It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.
The world has no hold on you. Whatever has a hold on you comes from your mind.
This building we're in has doors and windows. If we close the doors and windows, we can't get out. People lock themselves inside a house of delusions. But they're only delusions. They can leave anytime. Actually there is no house to leave. There's not even any leaving. What we see are flowers in the sky, the moon in the water. As for the meditative powers of Zen masters like Hsu-yun, sometimes it's useful to meditate and sometimes it isn't.
In the face of impermanence, if your next thought is good, this is what we call the realization body.
There is so much baggage we burden ourselves with over the years that keeps us from seeing things the way they are. Some baggage we carry with us for a single thought, some for years, and some for lifetimes. But there isn't one piece that isn't our own creation.
Every place is a place to practice. Every time is a time to practice. Zen is concerned with the thought we have this moment rather than with rituals or rules of behavior
Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don't keep reading the book. You have to travel. That's what practice is about. Traveling. Walking the path.
It's really hard for me to use the term 'history' in the singular, because it suggests a reductivist view of how moments and events congeal and reflect the passage of time. I'd rather stick to the pluralness of 'histories' in order to suggest the simultaneity, the parallel forces at work, which produce lived experience.
I always say that when I'm playing well, no one can beat me. I'm not just saying that to sound full of myself or anything, but it's true.
It's not that women are less corruptible than men are, it's that women have had less chance to become corrupt.
The naturalists of our own time hold equal faith in the wonders of the sea, but seek therein rather for the links of nature's chain than for apparent exceptions.