When I was working at Omega, I took this Zen retreat, where you're quiet, you don't say anything for a week, and this guy there said, "You're going to be enlightened at the end of this week, that's my goal. " I was the engineer, so I was recording everything at it was happening, but I was also participating, because I felt like it. So at the end of it, I did understand what enlightenment was, one-hundred percent.
The practice of Zen mind is beginner's mind. The innocence of the first inquiry—what am I?—is needed throughout Zen practice. The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything.
The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
In Tantric Zen you can be humorous and make fun of anything or you can be very serious.
The real goal of Zen is to find a way of life that's easy and undramatic. Strong attachments lead to upset and drama.
There is a beautiful flow to the study of Zen. If it is not making you happier, then you are not practicing correctly.
Old Zen is the way of nothingness, the way of having a good time.
Zen is the game of insight, the game of discovering who you are beneath the social masks.
This is Zen, and in Zen, as we all know. . . anything goes!
The whole aim of Zen is not to make foolproof statements about experience, but to come to direct grips with reality without the mediation of logical verbalizing.
I am an architect. I try to feel the transparency in contemporary buildings and I try to understand the transparency in Zen poetry. I just want to mix all those things.
If you say you had a zen moment, you already didn't.
You come back to the beginning. That's why in the "Searching for the Ox" sequence, at the very end of that sequence of the Zen paintings, we're back in the world again.
This particular school of Zen has always considered itself the Marines of the spiritual world, so it has a kind of bias against conceptual thinking in favor of a very rigorous physical life.
Tantric Zen is a state of mind
Throwing away Zen mind is correct Zen mind. Only keep the question, 'What is the best way of helping other people?'
People say that practicing Zen is difficult, but there is a misunderstanding as to why. It is not difficult because it is hard to sit in the cross- legged position, or to attain enlightenment. It is difficult because it is hard to keep our mind pure and our practice pure in its fundamental sense.
Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.
In Japanese art, space assumed a dominant role and its position was strengthened by Zen concepts.