David Schiller - The Little Zen Companion

DAVID SCHILLER IS THE AUTHOR OF
GUITARS, THE LITTLE BOOK OF PRAYERS, GOD,
AND OTHER BOOKS.
HE LIVES WITH HIS FAMILY
IN MONTCLAIR, NEW JERSEY,
AND ONLINE AT WWW.DAVIDSCHILLER.COM.

In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few.

SHUNRYU SUZUKI

Before a person studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are not waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.

ZEN SAYING

Im not young enough to know everything.

J.M. BARRIE

The willow is green; flowers are red.

ZEN SAYING

The flower is not red, nor is the willow green.

ZEN SAYING

Good pitching will always stop good hitting, and vice versa.

CASEY STENGEL

I am going to pose a question, King Milinda said to Venerable Nagasena. Can you answer?

Nagasena said, Please ask your question.

The king said, I have already asked.

Nagasena said, I have already answered.

The king said, What did you answer?

Nagasena said, What did you ask?

The king said, I asked nothing.

Nagasena said, I answered nothing.

WHOS ON FIRST ZEN

If you have to ask what jazz is, youll never know.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

The tao that can be told is
not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

TAO TE CHING

After taking the high seat to preach to the assembly, Fa-yen raised his hand and pointed to the bamboo blinds. Two monks went over and rolled them up in the same way. Fa-yen said, One gains, one loses.

ZEN KOAN

The thing about Zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose between madness and innocence. And Zen suggests that we may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as madmen or innocents, we are already there.

It might be good to open our eyes and see.

THOMAS MERTON

The Koan

Perhaps no aspect of Zen is as puzzling and yet intriguing to Westerners as the koan. Or as misunderstood. A koan is not a riddle, nor is it a paradox designed to shock the mind. Instead it is an integral part of a system honed over centuries to help bring the student to a direct realization of ultimate reality.

Taken from the Japanese k (public) and an (proposition), the koan can be a question, an excerpt from the sutras, an episode in the life of an ancient Master, a word exchanged in a mondo, or any other fragment of teaching. There are some 1,700 traditional koans in existence.

Koan practice begins when the Master assigns a classic first koan like Mu Chao-chous reply to the monk who asked him, Has the dog Buddhanature or not? It may literally take years of living with MU before a student truly understands it. But afterward, the next koansand there may be as many as 500 of them, in five progressive stagesare often answered in rapid succession.

The great Japanese Master Hakuin wrote, If you take up one koan and investigate it unceasingly, your mind will die and your will will be destroyed. It is as though a vast, empty abyss lay before you, with no place to set your hands and feet. You face death and your bosom feels as though it were on fire. Then suddenly you are one with the koan, and body and mind are cast off. This is known as seeing into ones nature.

But the Emperor has nothing on at all! cried a little child.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Wakuan complained when he saw a picture of bearded Bodhidharma, Why hasnt that fellow a beard?

ZEN KOAN

Soon the childs clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day we become seekers.

PETER MATTHIESSEN

One day a man approached Ikkyu and asked: Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?

Ikkyu took his brush and wrote: Attention.

Is that all? asked the man.

Ikkyu then wrote: Attention. Attention.

Well, said the man, I really dont see much depth in what you have written.

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times: Attention. Attention. Attention.

Half-angered, the man demanded: What does that word Attention mean, anyway?

Ikkyu gently responded, Attention means attention.

ZEN STORY

Standing on the bare ground a mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

EMERSON

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

EMPEDOCLES

Every day people are straying away from church and going back to God.

LENNY BRUCE

Love God and do what you will.

ST. AUGUSTINE

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

WILLIAM BLAKE

As I grew up I became increasingly interested in philosophy, of which they [his family] profoundly disapproved. Every time the subject came up they repeated with unfailing regularity, What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. After some fifty or sixty repetitions, this remark ceased to amuse me.

BERTRAND RUSSELL

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

MEISTER ECKHART

Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.

ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
Thats how the light gets in.

LEONARD COHEN

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirits one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlockmore than a maplea universe.

ANNIE DILLARD

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

DOGEN

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.

ROBERT M. PIRSIG

THE SECRET SITS

We dance around in a ring and suppose,

But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

ROBERT FROST

What is Buddha?

Again and again students ask, What is Buddha? The Masters seemingly nonsensical responses have survived over the centuries, often as koans.

What is Buddha?

Three pounds of flax. TUNG-SHAN

Dried shitstick. YUN-MEN

This very mind. MA-TSU

Not mind, not Buddha. MA-TSU

What is not the Buddha? NAN-YANG HUT-CHUNG

The cat is climbing up
the post PA-CHIAO HUI-CHING

I never knew him. NAN-YANG HUI-CHUNG

Wait until there is one, for then I will tell you. NAN-YANG HUI-CHUNG

A new bride rides a donkey, the mother-in-law leads it. SHOU-SHAN

When you utter the name of Buddha, wash out your mouth. ZEN SAYING