Tag Archives: Zen

Zen Saying

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually, one discovers that it is not boring, but very interesting.
-Zen Saying

Zen Quote

If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the present. ~Lao Tzu

Zen Proverb

“Student says ” I am very discouraged. What should I do?” Master says, “encourage others.”

– Zen Proverb

Sunday Zen Quote

“Mind is simply a combination of all the thoughts, of all the clouds. Mind has no independent nature of its own. When all the thoughts are gone and the sky is clean and clear, you will see that everything that you have paid so much attention to is nothing but emptiness. Your thoughts were all empty. They contained nothing, they were void. ” – Osho

Wednesday Evening Quote

“In Zen, you drop off all the stuff you don’t need- your worries, fears, opinions, preconceptions, attachments because you really don’t need them!

Complete Idiots Guide to Zen Living” –

Tuesday Evening Quote

“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 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

Zen Proverb

“When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger, and the other represents opportunity.”

– John F. Kennedy

Zen Proverb

The blue mountains are of themselves blue mountains;
The white clouds are of themselves white clouds.

Zenrin Kushu

Zen Proverb

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

Edward De Bono

The Way It Is

October 6 2014

When I see blue sky with a smattering of clouds, it makes me happy. This my fellow readers, is all I need. Don’t need religion, nor read the bible. Don’t need to be told how to enjoy life. I am just basically one happy man, that likes solitude, peace of mind, and quietness.

The coffee tastes so much better, when I’m in a Zen moment. It makes the day much easier to enjoy, and live life to the fullest.

88x31This work A Pondering Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Happy Birds

It’s early Saturday evening, and in an hour, the sun will be setting at 8:24 PM. Have the windows open, the baseball game is on the TV, and the best part is, the numerous birds all happy and chipper as they are tweeting away in one massive chorus. Sitting here listening to the birds, they are saying that there is still a lot to like about the earth, that we all call home. With a touch of Zen, life is grand.

Anxiety

So an ancient once said, “Accept the anxieties and difficulties of this life”. Don’t expect your practice to be clear of obstacles. Without hindrances the mind that seeks enlightenment may be burnt out. So an ancient once said, “Attain deliverance in disturbances”.

— Kyong Ho

Quote source

Rules

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one’s own rules–this
is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

— D. T. Suzuki

Quote source

Possess

All that is great cannot be possessed – and that is one of
the most foolish things man goes on doing. We want to possess.

— Osho

Snow Covered Park

On my daily walk this morning, I decided to cut through the local park, as the walking was kind of on the treacherous side. Lots of icy spots. I only took this one photo, and it does have a Zen look to it.

Snow covered park, 12/16/2013.
Snow covered park, 12/16/2013.

He knows not ….

He knows not where he’s going,
For the ocean will decide,
Its not the destination,
It’s the glory of the ride.
–Edward Monkton, Zen dog

Everything

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.
— Shunryu Suzuki

Meditation

Meditation is not about finding the self–quite the contrary: it is about finding one’s way beyond the self. Meditation is also not about ‘explaining the mind’. It is instead about clearing away clutter created by the mind. — David M. White

Conversation

A conversation is so much more than words: a conversation is eyes, smiles, the silences between the words. — Annika Thor

Opinions

But opinions, judgements, memories, dreaming about the future–ninety percent of the thoughts spinning around in our heads have no essential reality. — Charlotte J. Beck

Reality

To think in terms of either pessimism or optimism oversimplifies the truth. The problem is to see reality as it is. — Thich Nhat Hanh

We may believe ……

We may believe that we know what another person is thinking, but most often our efforts at ‘mind reading’ are projections of our own inner, self-centered concerns.
— Susan Edmiston, Leonard Scheff

Thinking

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.
— Jack Kerouac

Zen lives in the present

Zen lives in the present. The whole teaching is: how to be in the present; how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is.

– Osho

Mind is like the wood or stone from which… – Bodhidharma

Mind is like the wood or stone from which a person carves an image. If he carves a dragon or a tiger, and seeing it fears it, he is like a stupid person creating a picture of hell and then afraid to face it. If he does not fear it, then his unnecessary thoughts will vanish. Part of the mind produces sight, sound, taste, odor and sensibility, and from them raises greed, anger and ignorance with all their accompanying likes and dislikes.

-Bodhidharma