Carried to its final extreme, the logical end of this type of reaction to life is suicide. The hard-bitten kind of person is always, as it were, a partial suicide; some of himself is already dead
Buddha’s doctrine: Man suffers because of his craving to possess and keep forever things which are essentially impermanent… this frustration of the desire to possess is the immediate cause of suffering.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel for love is not ours to command.
Zen is a way of liberation concerned not with discovering what is good or bad or advantageous but what is.
If we live we live if we die we die if we suffer we suffer if we are terrified we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
At times almost all of us envy the animals. They suffer and die but do not seem to make a “problem” of it.
Faith is above all openness an act of trust in the unknown.
This-the immediate everyday and present experience-is IT the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
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.
But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on.
You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.
Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.
In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.
Religion is not a department of life it is something that enters into the whole of it.
In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America. And nobody has gone about it in such an aggressive way.
But to me nothing – the negative, the empty – is exceedingly powerful.
Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe.
The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god.
The reason we have poverty is that we have no imagination. There are a great many people accumulating what they think is vast wealth, but it’s only money… they don’t know how to enjoy it, because they have no imagination.
You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.
Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.