::Talking Zen::..

You have said it, but you have not understood.

(Jesus of Nazareth)


We take refuge in pride because we are afraid to tell the truth to ourselves.

(Kakuzo Okakura)


"This is my child, this is my wealth": such thoughts are the preoccupations of fools. If we are unable to own even ourselves, why make such claims?

(Buddha)


The samurai must maintain his faith in his beliefs, even as the social or political climate shifts and alters. He must be patient, must act in a manner that may at times seem irrational or illogical, must resist the temptations of instant gratification, and must work towards fulfilling what may seem to be an impossible idea.

As a result, the samurai is often something of an outsider, a rebellious figure because he refuses to conform to the habits of the day.

(Takahiro Kitamura)


Why is the tao so valuable?
Because it is everywhere,
and everyone can use it.

This is why those who seek
will find,
And those who reform
will be forgiven;
Why the good
will be rewarded,
And the thief who is cunning
will escape.

(Lao Tzu)


Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, zen made them practical.

(Kakuzo Okakura)


When facing a single tree, if you look at a single one of its red leaves, you will not see all the others. When the eye is not set on one leaf, and you face the tree with nothing at all in mind, any number of leaves are visible to the eye without limit. But if a single leaf holds the eye, it will be as if the remaining leaves were not there.

(Takuan Soto)


She did not consciously think, "Ah, today I learned this and that; I gained this much." You do not do it step by step that way, by adding on coatings of varnish, or new paint. When learning becomes you, then it appears as you need it, when you are being you. Sometimes true learning surprises you when it emerges.

(Chungliang Al Huang)


The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen.

(Vanda Scaravelli)


The tao is both singular and universal. It is open to all with the resolve and inclination to walk it. Those who do, however, take a variety of disciplines in approaching it, for the tao extrapolates from the specific to the general.

(Dave Lowry)


If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)


Without the tao,
Kindness and compassion are replaced by law and justice;
Faith and trust are supplanted by ritual and ceremony.

(Lao Tzu)


In the history of Chinese civilisation, no significant scientific advances came as a result of Confucian studies. They were scholastics, and a scholastic in those times was one who went by the book, who believed what the ancient text or the ancient scriptures said, and who studied them and became proficient in them like a rabbi or a Christian theologian.

But mystics have never been very interested in theology. Mystics are interested in direct experience, and therefore - although you may laugh at them and say they are not scientific - they are empirical in their approach. And the taoists, being mystics, were the only great group of ancient Chinese people who seriously studied nature. They were interested in its principles from the beginning, and their books are full of analogies between the taoist way of life and the behaviour of natural forces seen in water, wind, or plants and rocks.

(Alan Watts)


Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.

(Edward De Bono)


Kindness should become the natural way of life,
not the exception.

(Buddha)


After a heavy snowfall the more rigid branches
of the pine break under the weight of the snow,
but the more supple willow branches bend,
thus allowing the snow to fall to the ground.

(Tao: Sacred Symbols)

The judgements of particular times, places and people depend on subjective standpoints and therefore are not the same thing as objective truths in themselves.

(Cleary)