Conversation with Buddha

Dear Buddha,

Today I felt the desire to engage in a conversation with you....

In a few days I will be completing 56 magnificent years…The years of vivid emotions joy, innocence, love, hate, happiness, ego, sadness, fear, trial, error, success, failure, temptation etc., that I can’t deny nor ignore it. I see before me the faces of countless people, who remind me of ordinary and extraordinary events in my life.

The passage of time and your teaching has gradually helped me to see all these experiences in a clearer light and softens its significance realizing the meaning of impermanence and illusion. This introspective gaze made it possible a more serene and objective evaluation of my life I have met along the way.

On this beautiful day, I simply wish to express my warm gratitude to my parents, entire family and all friends for being in my life with their unconditional love.

I want to express my profound thanks to almighty for everything. For giving me countless lessons and opportunities to kindle my awareness. For giving me a chance and strength to stand up whenever I fall down. For giving me health and happiness. For giving me a most caring wife and awesome children. For giving me most loving family and true friends who stood by me in my darkest hours.

Most importantly for giving me precious gift of Free Will; the choice to accept or not to accept responsibility for where I am right now and where I am going next; the complete freedom and choice to change, alter and grow within.

Though there maybe times….I may digress and will leave your side while walking this mystical journey further; but I know that I will always come back to your path.

As someone rightly said “Man is immersed in time. He is born, lives and dies within time. Birth establishes one date, the first of his life, and death another, the last: defining the beginning and end of his existence on earth.”

I’m looking forward for the remaining years to walk with you holding my hand and guide me through your most divine teaching….

Timelessly yours,
Aditya

ORDINARY LIFE AS A SPIRITUAL PATH

Ordinary life is the spiritual path and it becomes a delight to consider this viewpoint as a genuine prospect and truly as a way of living one’s life. The reasoning behind it is quite complex. Most certainly it rests upon the Buddhist perspective of impermanence and the transitory nature of phenomena, but also upon our distant loss of the power and beauty of childhood and the rather boring and unstimulating nature of adulthood we seem to have acquired by comparison. It also ties in with the fact that we all want happiness and bliss, which we mostly felt, in some measure, as children and also with the idea that drugs of all kinds can never safely or permanently recreate those vivid feelings and perceptions we had as a child. Yet that is in essence what we crave. Even our unhappinesses taken together, all in a sweep, also reflect the transitory and unsatisfying nature of existence; fundamentally so, and thus if we cannot change the world then we can at least begin to change our response to it, our perception of it and the way we view it and feel it inside, as compared to the mundane view of sensory perception, material substance and the dictates of physical science. We can project upon the world the same blissful vision that we had as a child and then it becomes again a delight to be alive. We must also sweep into this picture the fact of our own personal death and the grievous sense of loss we feel for those we love who will die, and those who have already passed away.

 Part of this story must be personal as it regards my own discovery of these ideas for myself earlier in my life. I feel I hardly knew my father, when he died and I was only 15. My respect for him is mainly genetic I suppose, but I feel that he was more important to me [and that we were much closer] than he was in reality. I suppose what I mean is that my childhood was intensely beautiful and a hard act to follow as it means I find adult life pretty dull and uninspiring, in general, compared with those times. As long as I focus on here and now I feel fine but at times I yearn for the glory which has passed away. I always have. And all that has slipped away forsure. That is why I find comfort in Buddhism with its emphasis on loss and decay and our trying to accept change and the transitory. But deep down I do honestly feel the loss of all those wonderful characters from my early life. I wish I could meet them all again. I suppose it is that which inspires my artistic efforts more than anything. So I try to keep my awareness of such matters superficial. I have done much work on my attitude towards my father as I feel he was much more important to me than I used to think. Father-son relationships are probably fraught with difficulties because men are so emotionally inept and so ungiving [hard and ungenerous with affection] in many ways compared with women.

 But later, when I also lost my mother and several aunts and uncles, and other people who were dear to me, I began to see the staggering universality of my situation. I began to see that this is precisely what Buddhism is talking about: the transience of the world and all its contents. The loss of those we love and hold dear, the ceaseless racing forwards of life; it can never be held or stopped in one place; it just keeps racing along against our will. For example, we seem powerless to change the flow of events or to bring back our departed loved ones. In this sense, most certainly, 'samsara' [embodied existence] seems like a nightmare into which we are plunged against our will, as Buddhists contend. The realisation of the universality of my predicament made me conceive the possibility that life could again become engaging and artistic and beautiful as well as meaningful, rather than being the random chaos of molecules and the extinction at death [the view of science] or the nihilism of emptiness.

Ordinary life is the path. The task is to transform ordinary life into a meaningful and engaging precious spiritual path and so to render it extraordinary, which was always the search of the alchemists of old [their Grail-like 'philosophers stone']. The method seems to be to convert through projected imagination each person one meets into a secret joy and each object, view and experience and appearance as a secret joy and containing a mysterious and delightful bliss. To give love unconditionally, generously and freely to all things, as a child does. This serves to utterly negate the view of ordinariness, which is the adult’s predominant perception of the world, as opposed to the child’s vision or that of the magician. This process negates the mundane ordinariness which we conceive to underpin 'adult reality', but projects onto our perceived reality a sheen of beauty and preciousness which it has come to lack, and which cannot be normally considered real due to one’s own accumulated knowledge of how the world works, and how people operate. We know that people die and get old and that things break and are destroyed and we know that we shall never see our loved ones ever again. But if we can place all that knowledge to one side and ignore it then it is perfectly possible to construct an alternative reality, founded entirely upon magical principles, for example.

As adults, we know that every person will get old and die. In this sense therefore, they will ‘let us down’ forsure and any love we invest in them looks, from this viewpoint, like 'wasted' energy. I recall feeling precisely that after my father died. I thought what is the point in loving anyone if they are going to die anyway? It seems utterly stupid. Although they give us joy and delight for a time we know they will die and be separated from us permanently. Thus on a deep level we conceive that they have 'let us down'. No matter how much you love them, they are doomed to die. Knowing this can certainly make us feel very miserable and depressed about life. Thus, people can never really give us the delight and joy we crave, and which, Eden-like, we enjoyed daily as children. Well, not for very long. We crave pleasure and sensation and happiness. But how can the pleasure from such transient things ever satisfy us? Once this unpalatable fact is realised, and truly sinks in, then we might feel tempted to enter into a state of deep misery. As adults, we can pretty fundamentally see that existence is flawed and is profoundly unsatisfying due to its inherently transient and impermanent nature. But children seem to be blissfully unaware of death and impermanence and thus their vision of the world tends to be fresh, pure and vivid. Maybe by projecting onto this world the same bliss, love and joy which the child projects, and by simultaneously suppressing our knowledge of the adult view, we can regain a joyful lifestyle. That is the trick.

The sad fact of one’s own death is a certainty. Just about as certain as anything that will ever happen. It is both certain and inevitable, yet we tend to shy away from this fact and hide away from it. The older we get, the more keenly we seem to become aware of this fact. We reject the idea as nonsensical and no way to live our lives, and so proceed just as if we are immortal and base our everyday life on a dream which contains no element of death at all, no element of personal extinction. Thus Buddhists, and other ascetics, through daily contemplating the transient nature of the world, and of themselves, duly reach the pretty miserable conclusion that no pleasure is worth having, if it is to be so transient. No pleasure of that type can be entirely satisfying and is thus flawed and unwanted. They reject it as pleasure tainted with suffering, like licking honey from the razor's sharp edge. What certain Buddhists then do [Tantrikas] is to transform this mundane world into something nice and dress it up in very smart clothes. The fact of death is for all practical purposes denied and suppressed and the transient nature of the world is also disguised and hidden from view. One regards each being as one’s own precious mother and worthy of enormous affection and delight. One views every view and place as part of a pure land of great bliss, and buildings as mandala palaces. Life again becomes a sweet joy and every sensation is transformed into a source of bliss. When the grim fact of death and the transient nature of the world are rejected, then the world becomes once again quite an attractive place to be.

I know that the world has not really changed at all since my childhood, and yet my perception of it is very different today than it was then. It was joyous, delightful and elevating then, but it tends to be bland, dull and predictable today. Thus one feels, in the adult world, a sense of loss and that that vision of loveliness was itself an illusion, and the true, dull adult picture has replaced it as the only real version of reality decent folk should entertain or carry around with them. How can we change this? How can life again become delightful and joyous for an adult just as if they had become a child again in their perception of the world? In my own case it was the sudden realisation that I was not alone in my plight, the universality of my plight hit me and then I began to see that it is not just my problem but the problem of everybody. So my mission became to find a way to return to that mystical and joyous view of the world which was the heart and soul of my childhood, and which sits at the very heart of all the arts, of music, romance and religion.

If we examine the nature of childhood and adulthood more closely we might find some clues to help us in this search. The child’s view of the world is essentially based upon a profound ignorance about how the world works and how people operate, and a general innocence about everything. The adult’s view of the world, by contrast, is based upon an excessively over-detailed knowledge about the world and how it works and how people operate. Thus, to regain the child’s perception of the world, which is in essence an artistic and spiritual vision of the world as a joyous and engaging place to be, one must lose, or suppress, the boring adult view and then cultivate anew the mystery and innocence of the child’s vision of the world. That seems to be the bottom line. Thus adult life attains a high degree of predictability and regularity, which is lacking from the child’s view. Our knowledge about it actually destroys our innocent and exciting vision of the world. In this sense our knowledge might be seen as burdensome.

One must regain a sense of mystery, magic and stimulation from the world which we have lost, and lose or suppress, to a large extent our knowledge of the ways of people and the world, and its boring predictability. This, in essence, is the position we all find ourselves in. To become free and liberated from the shackles of a sad, depressed boredom and lack of stimulation by the world, we must surrender the tight grip our knowledge of it and its ways has upon us, and become re-attuned and re-awakened to the world around us as a joyous spiritual vision and a magical play.

Adults have, in any case, mostly stopped looking at the world around them and do not tend to be very 'switched on' to its changes every day. Apart from the weather, they fail to see, or to delight in, the myriad subtle changes which are taking place all the time around us. Adults fail to see because they do not look beyond the barest mundane facts they need to assimilate in order to function, such as driving to work and listening to what others say etc. Beyond that, they seem to train down their perception into a minimal state and so fail to see much that is happening. They have switched off. By contrast, children seem to have all their sensory apparatus switched to 'full volume' and so see and hear much that is magical and engaging about the world, and which excites and uplifts their spirits. They have a keen sense of the mystery, excitement and unpredictability of the world which the adult has very largely lost.

In general, adults have also become excessively focused on 'mundane crap' such as money, career and status, and dismiss as 'hocus-pocus' the joyous spirituality of any magical perception of life. It must be significant that children are not especially interested in such mundane matters, until as teenagers, they are forced to do so by irate parents, wary of their possibly imminent and hapless fate as scroungers and drop-outs. Interest in true or natural religion has massively declined in the world, while obsession with mundane trivia and unbridled materialism surrounds us on every quarter.

Most adults do not hear the birdsong or see the golden sunsets, except when 'on holiday', when it is deemed acceptable to indulge such temporary pleasures. Such things are only seen by children and those artists and romantics who are ‘in love’ with someone or the world itself. Being ‘in love’ with someone is also of interest as it is the exact state we want to be in. It constitutes 'the drug' or 'spectacles' we need to help us to view the world afresh. To help us to re-engage with the world, and to lose our knowledge of it, and help us regain the sense of mystery, magic and newness every day. While some people use narcotics or sex or food or spending money or TV to distract themselves from the sad state of their lives [or indeed, as we said before, of life in general at a very fundamental level], and to create alternative realities, these all carry hefty price-tags in terms of sanity, health and longevity. None therefore are entirely satisfactory options for serious consideration. All these ‘devices’ act by temporarily suspending our boring, mundane, predictable perception of the world and reintroduce, reinforce and reinvigorate an exciting and mysterious view. They also negate or displace our awareness of death and transience and refocus our attention upon beauty, art and spirituality. For example, the pantheons of all religious gods, saints, fairies, pixies, nature spirits, icons and deities all conspire to reinforce mystery, unpredictability and excitement and to reintegrate these qualities into our lives. That is undoubtedly a very important psychological function of all religions, and also of love, sex and drugs.

Fundamentally, children are joyous and happy while adults are bored. And deep down I think adults wish to regain that joyful child’s view, in exchange, were it possible, for their boredom. And that neatly summarizes the predicament we are all in. But adults sceptically dismiss the child's vision as fake, doubt its reality, think it was an illusion, and, instead, tend to genuinely believe that their dull boring existence is the only sane way to live on this earth. And in any case they do not know how to proceed or how to even begin to recreate the child's joyous vision of the world. That is the very secret. That touches the heart of all secrets. How do we want to live? Bored to death in a safe and cosy prison of predictability? Or alive and awake, in love with the world and all its contents, in a dancing vision of spirit and innocence? It looks like a straight choice and they seem to be mutually exclusive paths which we might choose to take.

'…the movement of the higher thought, as far as we can trace it, has on the whole been from magic through religion to science. In magic man depends upon his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature...in the acuter minds magic is [then] superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power…religion is then later displaced by science...here at last man has hit upon a clue to the labyrinth, a golden key that opens many locks in the treasury of nature…' [Frazer, 1922, The Golden Bough A Study in Magic and Religion, pp.711-12]

In his monumental tome, Frazer clearly depicts the transition in human beliefs from the magical to the religious and then to the scientific, but he signally ignores the fact that children delight in magic and then he fails to even consider what serious, great and vital function the magical might actually have in our lives, as compared to the bland and unpalatable diet dished up by scientists! If folks want to believe in elves and fairies, magic and deities, then so be it. If it enables them to make more sense of their sad little lives, if it helps them to be happier, to walk so much taller, and to smile and laugh more often, then what possible damage can it cause? And in the last analysis, on some deep, elemental plane, it might even be found to be truer than Newton's laws of motion or Schroedinger's equations.

The fact remains that no matter what solid and predictable laws can be shown to apply to matter, energy, space and time, we as spirits, enter and leave this world completely alone. What is important to us, truly and deeply important, is not really what happens here per se, or the ‘rules’ which regulate its contents, but it is those impulses we bring with us, and those we take away with us. For ultimately it is those impulses that cause our happiness and joy and not any diktat from materialist philosophers, or truly and deeply what befalls us here. Thus, ultimately, we always retain our subjective viewpoint, which always seems to take precedence over any mundane and predictable knowledge we might gain about reality and mind. It is thus my contention that religions of all kinds [as belief systems] play an important role in our lives. That role essentially enables us, if we choose to engage with it, to understand ourselves and the world more intimately, and to add the important extra ingredient of meaning to a life that might otherwise be utterly devoid of it. And a life with such meaning is, quite probably, a happy life, while one without any is most assuredly an unhappy one.

By:PETER MORRELL

Children of Heaven

Winner of the Montreal World Film Festival Grand Prix of the Americas Award and the Air Canada People's Award, CHILDREN OF HEAVEN is a sensitive, memorable, amazingly spiritual and beautiful film from Majid Majidi. ``Children of Heaven'' is about a home without unhappiness. About a brother and sister who love one another, instead of fighting.

This heart touching story brings back family values, and the rewards that come to a hard working family. The story is set in Iran, and the main characters are Ali and his sister Zahra, who struggle with a problem that they must keep away from their parents. Ali managed to lose his little sister’s shoes, and knowing their parents had no money until the next few months, they couldn’t turn to their sick mother, or poor hardworking father for a new pair. The children come up with a solution that might work if little Zahra could run just a little faster in her brother’s too big, beat up shoes. You see, every day she would wear Ali’s shoes to her morning class, and then meet Ali in the alley where they would exchange shoes and he would wear them to his afternoon class. In the meantime, Zahra learns that her shoes were picked up by a blind man and given to his daughter who attends the same school. Everyday she watches her running and skipping in her old, sparkly, red shoes. The other great aspect of this movie is the family is poor and often run out of things at the end of a pay period. They struggle to make ends meet, and often have to do without when they run out of things. Ali’s father receives some gardening tools and decides to try to make some extra money on the weekend. His father decides to take Ali on a bike ride into the rich city, much more modern than the poor slums they live in on the outskirts of the city. They go in search of gardening work; the father finds it difficult to find any customers by speaking into the intercom systems of the big, intimidating mansions. He just gets shut down by the stuck up people on the other side wondering why he is bothering them. The young and brave Ali steps up and finds a man who is in need of a gardener, Ali scores himself a playmate and fun toys to play with for the afternoon and work for his father. Now back to the shoe issue, Ali finally finds his answer. He enters a running race for boys and the third place winner gets a new pair of shoes. Ali battles the other boys, but fails to succeed at getting new shoes because he comes in first place instead of third place. Ali must then go home to tell his sister the heartbreaking news. I don’t want to ruin the ending, but I am sure you can imagine it is a happy one, as the children continue to struggle to find a solution. They are such wonderful, obedient and respectful little children. They know they must take their problems into their own hands. Since their parents did not create this mess, they do not want to burden them with it. They decide to help each other and come up with a plan that works for them, although not as smoothly as they would like. This is a movie that is great for the entire family.

Its a masterpiece....

DECONSTRUCT

Deconstructivism is the answer while constructivism is the old age problem.

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Deconstruct self-esteem (ego) and find self.

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Deconstruct prejudice and find humanity.

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Deconstruct opinion and find open-mindedness.

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Deconstruct thinking and find experience.

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Deconstruct labels and find sensations.

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Deconstruct images and find reality.

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Deconstruct pride and find humility.

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Deconstruct idolatry and find Spirit.

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Deconstruct constructivism and find the land of the nonverbal.

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Deconstruct nationalism and find peace.

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Deconstruct greed and find plenty.

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Deconstruct verbal philosophy and find the dimension of being.

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Deconstruct your images of family and find people.

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Deconstruct sentimentality and find much ado about nothing.

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Deconstruct the images of life the world promotes and find the

meaningless sham of materialism.

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Deconstruct the images of living the youth and fun culture promote and find the meaninglessness of gratification.

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Deconstruct pleasure and find emptiness.

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Deconstruct and find less is more.

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Deconstruct and find that thinking and imaging are rarely practical, factual, or logical.

By Kevin Everett FitzMaurice

A Little Zen

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The following are taken from The Little Zen Companion by David Schiller.

Yasutani Roshi

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Mark Twain

There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.

Thoreau

Our life is frittered away by detail ... Simplify, simplify.

Chuang-Tsu

The purpose of a fishtrap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. 

The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. 

The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. 

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? He is the one I would like to talk to.

Bulgarian Proverb

If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water.

Yaqui Mystic

To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.

Buddhist Proverb

When the student is ready, the Master appears.

Chinese Proverb

Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.

Basho

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

Lew Welch

Someone showed it to me and I found it by myself.

Ts'ai Ken T'an

Water which is too pure has no fish.

Zen Saying

The one who is good at shooting does not hit the center of the target.

Tao Te Ching

In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don't try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present.

Word carved on a stone on John Ruskin's desk

TODAY.

Zen Parable

A man walking across a field encounters a tiger. He fled, the tiger chasing after him. Coming to a cliff, he caught hold of a wild vine and swung himself over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Terrified, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger had come, waiting to eat him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little began to gnaw away at the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine in one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted!

Goethe

Thinking is more interesting that knowing, but less interesting than looking.

William Hazlitt

Whatever interests, is interesting.

Tao Te Ching

We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

Artur Schnabel

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.

John Cage

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.

R.H. Blyth

We walk, and our religion is shown (even to the dullest and most insensitive person) in how we walk. Or to put it more accurately, living in this world means choosing, choosing to walk, and the way we choose to walk is infallibly and perfectly expressed in the walk itself. Nothing can disguise it. The walk of an ordinary man and of an enlightened man are as different as that of a snake and a giraffe.

Folk Zen Saying

A heavy snowfall disappears into the sea. What silence!

Zen Saying

Knock on the sky and listen to the sound!

Woody Allen

I'm astounded by people who want to "know" the universe when it's hard enough to find your way around Chinatown.

W.H. Auden

To ask the hard question is simple.

Zen Koan

What is your face before your mother and father were born?

Thoreau

It is as hard to see one's self as to look backwards without turning around.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

The three qualities necessary for training

Great faith. Great doubt. Great effort.

Albert Einstein

The true value of a human being can be found in the degree to which he has attained liberation from the self.

Carl Jung

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Who is the Potter, pray, and who is the Pot?

Coco Chanel

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

John Lennon

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

Samuel Johnson

When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

Zen Mondo

A monk asked Chao-chou, "I have just entered the monastery: please give me some guidance." 

Chao-chou said, "Have you eaten your rice gruel?" 

The monk said,"Yes, I've eaten." 

Chao-chou said, "Then go wash your bowl."

Albert Einstein, three rules of work

1. Out of clutter, find simplicity. 

2. From discord, find harmony. 

3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Kahlil Gigran

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.

Robert M. Pirsig

So the thing to do when working on a motorcycle, as in any other task, is to cultivate the peace of mind which does not separate one's self from one's surroundings. When that is done successfully, then everything else follows naturally. Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.

Charles Dickens

He did each single thing as if he did nothing else.

Willa Cather

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

St. Anthony

The prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer recognizes himself or the fact that he is praying.

Rilke

-Children, one earthly Thing truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.

Zen Koan

What is the color of wind?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The mystical is not how the world is, but that it is.

Zen Story

Fa-yen, a Chinese Zen teacher, overheard four monks arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: "There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?" 

One of the monks replied: "From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind." 

"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Fa-yen, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."

Lin-Chi

When you meet a master swordsman, show him your sword. When you meet a man who is not a poet, do not show him your poem.

Wallace Stevens

The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.

Zen Koan

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in teh wind. One said, "The flag moves." The other said, "The wind moves." They argued back and forth but could not agree. Hui-neng, the sixth Patriarch, said: "Gentlemen! It is not the flag that moves. It is not the wind that moves. It is your mind that moves." The two monks were struck with awe.

Zen Saying

Be master of mind rather than mastered by mind.

Shakespeare

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The Buddha

Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox. Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a pure mind, happiness will follow you, as a shadow clings to a form.

Spanish Proverb

It is notthe same to talk of bulls as to be in the bullring.

G. K. Chesterton

You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Simone Weil

Attachment is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by someone who is detached.

Zen Story

Two monks were once travelling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unable to cross the intersection. 

"Come on, girl," siad the first monk. Lifting her in his arms, he carried her over the mud. 

The second monk did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he no longer could restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he said. "It is dangerous. Why did you do that?" 

"I left the girl there,: the first monk said. "Are you still carrying her?"

Zen Saying

When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man.

Zen Story

Wealthy patrons invited Ikkyu to a banquet. Ikkyu arrived dressed in his beggar's robes. The host, not recognizing hin, chased him away. Ikkyu went home, chaged into his ceremonial robe of purple brocade, and returned. With great respect, he was received into the banquet room. There, he put his robe on the cushion, saying, "I expect you invited the robe since you showed me away a little while ago," and left.

Erich Fromm

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself.

Dogen

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

Taoist Mondo

One day Chuang-tzu and a friend were walking along a riverbank. "How delightfully the fishes are enjoying themselves in the water!" Chuang-tzu exclaimed. 

"You are not a fish," his friend said. "How do you know whether or not the fishes are enjoying themselves?" 

"You are not me," Chuang-tzu said. "How do you know that I do not know that the fishes are enjoying themselves?"

Kentucky Folklore

"My feet are cold," one says, and the legless man replies: "So are mine. So are mine."

Zen Koan

When you can do nothing, what can you do?

Pablo Picasso

Computer are useless. They can only give the answers.

Krishnamurti

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

Tao te Ching

The more you know the less you understand.

Peter Matthiessen

In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us.