Quotes from Zen To Go

Collection of my favorite quotes from the Job Winokur book ‘Zen To Go’.

On a visit to Book Buyers in Mountain View, I chanced upon the book Zen To Go by Jon Winokur. The book is essentially a list of quotes about Zen, compiled by Winokur. I found some of them to be very witty and it was on sale for five bucks, so I picked it up. It turned out to be a great book! Winokur does a great job organizing the quotes into sections, so when you read each section, you get a nice perspective on the topic, as though you read an essay on it. This post is just a collection of my favorite quotes from the book, by topic. Here we go:

ZEN

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
ROBERT PIRSIG

Zen is the a Japanese translation of a Chinese translation (ch’an) of Sanskrit word (dhyana) for meditation.

Zen is simply a voice crying, “Wake up! Wake up!”
MAHA STHAVIRA SANGHARAKSHITA

Studying about Zen should never be confused with practicing Zen, just as studying aesthetics should not be confused with being an artist.
T.P. KASULIS

Zen aims at freedom but its practice is disciplined.
GARY SNYDER

Zen is to have the heart and soul of a little child.
TAKUAN

Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.
SHUNRYU SUZUKI

ACTION

The way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
LAO TZU

The best part of one’s life is the working part, the creative part. Believe me, I love to succeed…However, the real spiritual and emotional excitement is in the doing.
GARSON KANIN

Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
PAUL GOODMAN

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
ALBERT EINSTEIN

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
GEORGE ELIOT

Originality and the feeling of one’s own dignity are achieved only through work and struggle.
DOSTOEVSKY

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built.
FRANTZ FANON

Put your heart, mind, intellect and soul even to your smallest acts. This is the secret of success.
SWAMI SIVANANDA

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
SHUNRYU SUZUKI

The actions of every instant, every day, must be right… Every gesture is important. How we eat, how we put on our clothes, how we wash ourselves, how we go to the toilet, how we put our things away, how we act with other people, family, wife, work — how we are: totally, in every single gesture.
TAISEN DESHIMARU

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
MARCUS AURELIUS

When archery is performed in a state of “no-thought” (mushin), which means the absence of all ego consciousness, the archer is free from inhibitions as he puts an arrow into his bow, stretches the string, lets his eye rest on the target and, when the adjustment is correct, lets the arrow go. There is no feeling of good or bad, accomplishment or failure. This is the “everyday mind” arising from “no-mind,” and it is the essence of all the Zen martial arts to remain in this state, with no thought of life or death.
ANNE BANCROFT

You completely ignore everything and just concentrate. You forget about the whole world and you just are part of the car and the track… It is very special feeling. You’re completely out of this world. There is nothing like it.
JOCHEN RINDT

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
G.K. CHESTERTON

How can you think and hit at the same time?
YOGI BERRA

NATURE

Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.
DOGEN

Except during the nine months before he dawns his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

The world is not to be put in order, the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order.
HERNRY MILLER

To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
EMERSON

THE WAY

It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.
CONFUCIUS

All know the way; few actually walk it.
BODHIDHARMA

The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
ROBERT PIRSIG

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
BASHO

I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!

RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

The Way that can be told is not the eternal way.
LAO TZU

If you know that fundamentally there is nothing to seek, you have settled your affairs.
RINZAI

Every day Master Shigen (c. 900) had the following dialogue with himself: “Hey, Master!” “Yes?” “Are you listening?” “Yes.” “Don’t be complacent!”

“I won’t!”

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
ERIC HOFFER

A person who says, “I’m enlightened” probably isn’t.
BABA RAM DASS

Everyone is in the best seat.
JOHN CAGE

NO-KNOWLEDGE

To know what you do no know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is disease.
LAO TZU

I don’t know. I don’t care. And it doesn’t make any difference.
JACK KEROUAC

Nothing is more conductive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
G. C. LICHTENBERG

MEDITATION

What is called zazen is sitting on a zafu [pillow] in a quiet room, absolutely still, in the exact and proper position and without uttering a word, the mind empty of any thought, good or wicked. It is continuing to sit peacefully, facing a wall, and nothing more. Every day.
TAISEN DESHIMARU

Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
PAUL VALERY

Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
KRISHNAMURTI

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
FRANZ KAFKA

When one devotes oneself to meditation, mental burdens, unnecessary worries, and wondering thoughts drop off one by one; life seems to run smoothly and pleasantly. A student may now depend on intuition to make decisions. As one acts on intuition, second thought, with dualism, doubt and hesitation, does not arise.
NYOGEN SENZAKI

I neglect God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.
JOHN DONNE

SATORI

It is in the unearthly first hour of twilight that earth’s almost agonized livingness is felt. This hour is so dreadful to some people that they hurry indoors to turn on the lights.
ELIZABETH BOWEN

I sat there listening with my whole being, and with my whole strength contemplating that mountain that I so dearly love… Was there anyone in the world, at that moment, as happy as I?
COLETTE RICHARD

I was sitting by the ocean one late summer afternoon, watching the waves rolling in and feeling the rhythm of my breathing, when suddenly I became aware of my whole environment as being engaged in a gigantic cosmic dance… . I “saw” cascades of energy coming down from outer space, in which particles were created and destroyed in rhythmic pulses; I “saw” the atoms of the elements and those of my body participating in this cosmic dance of energy; I felt its rhythm and I “heard” its sound, and at that moment I knew that this was the Dance of Shiva, the Lord of Dancers worshiped by the Hindus.
FRITJOF CAPRA

Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.
LAO TZU

The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
SIR JAMES JEANS

BEGINNER’S MIND

To understand truth one must have a very sharp, precise, clear mind; not a cunning mind, but a mind that is capable of looking without any distortion, a mind innocent and vulnerable.
KRISHNAMURTI

“Did you have a happy childhood?” is a false question. As a child I did not know what happiness was, and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.
ALISTAIR REID

ART

Correct handling of flowers refines the personality.
BOKUYO TAKEDA

Archery, fencing, spear fighting, all of the martial arts, tea ceremony, flower arranging… in all of these, correct breathing, correct balance, and correct stillness help to remake the individual. The basic aim is always the same: by tirelessly practicing a given skill, the student finally sheds the ego with its fears, worldly ambitions, and reliance on objective scrutiny — sheds it so completely that he becomes the instrument of a deeper power, from which mastery falls instinctively, without further effort on his part, like a ripe fruit.
KARLFRIED GRAF DURCKHEIM

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.
SHUNRYU SUZUKI

The art of the tea Way consists simply of boiling water, preparing tea and drinking it.
RIKYU

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
VINCENT VAN GOGH

ILLUSION

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
C.S. LEWIS

I think I think; therefore, I think I am.
AMBROSE BIERCE

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
PABLO PICASSO

The way to solve conflict between human values and technological needs is not to run away from technology. That’s impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a real understanding of what technology is — not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.
ROBERT PIRSIG

Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
CYRIL CONNOLLY

ATTACHMENT

We grow weary of those things (and perhaps soonest) which we most desire.
SAMUEL BUTLER

Our desires always increase with our possessions. The knowledge that something remains yet unenjoyed impairs our enjoyment of the good before us.
SAMUEL JOHNSON

There must be more to life than having everything!
MAURICE SENDAK

If there is to be any peace it will come through being not having.
HENRY MILLER

Man’s many desires are like the small metal coins he carries about in his pocket. The more he has the more they weigh him down.
SATYA SAI BABA

SELF

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that’s your own self.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
ALAN WATTS

TIME

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.
TAISEN DESHIMARU

In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
ANDRE GIDE

We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness: it is always urgent, “here and now” without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
JOSE ORTEGA Y GASSET

I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.
ALAN WATTS

LIFE

Life just is. You have to flow with it. Give yourself to the moment. Let it happen.
JERRY BROWN

The best way to prepare for life is to begin to live.
ELBERT HUBBARD

Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
KIERKEGAARD

Dreams are real while they last. Can we say more of life?
HAVELOCK ELLIS

REALITY

Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people.
HUANG PO

The ancient intuition that all matter, all “reality,” is energy, that all phenomena, including time and space, are mere crystallizations of mind, is an idea with which few physicists have quarreled since the theory of relativity first called into question the separate identities of energy and matter. Today most scientists would agree with the ancient Hindus that nothing exists or is destroyed, things merely change shape or form; that matter is insubstantial in origin, a temporary aggregate of he pervasive energy that animates the electron.
PETER MATTHIESSEN

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL

ORDINARY MIND

If you walk, just walk. If you sit, just sit; but whatever you do, don’t wobble.
UMMON

The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
ROBERT PIRSIG

I go about looking at horses and cattle. They eat grass, make love, work when they have to, bear their young. I am sick with envy of them.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON

If you are not happy here and now, you never will be.
TAISEN DESHIMARU

God is in the details.
MEIS VAN DER ROHE

While I have been fumbling over books And thinking about God and the Devil and all, Other young men have been battling with the days And others have been kissing the beautiful women.
ALDOUS HUXLEY

I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods: — in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is necessary, or any explanation.
D.T. SUZUKI

NO-MIND

When the mind is nowhere it is everywhere. When it occupies one tenth, it is absent in the other nine tenths.
TAKUAN

Mindfulness is a state wherein one is totally aware in any situation and so always able to respond appropriately. Yet one is aware of being aware. Mindlessness, on the other hand, or “no-mindness” as it has been called, is a condition of such complete absorption that there is not vestige of self-awareness.
PHILIP KAPLEAU

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only of how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER

People think the Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t. We’re just doing it.
JOHN LENNON

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?
SATCHELL PAIGE

NOTHINGNESS

Clay is molded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing… Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not.
LAO TZU

Apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?
HAROLD PINTER

If you’ve made it through to here, you can see that these are a great set of quotes. Many of them hit home and made me think about them for a while. You should definitely get the book! Finally, a parting quote..

There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.

GERTRUDE STEIN