Koan Quotes

Collection of famous quotes and sayings about Koan.

Quotes About Koan

Enjoy collection of 33 Koan quotes. Download and share images of famous quotes about Koan. Righ click to see and save pictures of Koan quotes that you can use as your wallpaper for free.

Our minds are a lot like our rear-ends. Sometimes they are constipated, other times stricken with mental diarrhea, and occasionally a little bubbly. However, none of these and all of these conditions define our rear-ends or our personalities. Could contentment come from accepting all of our rocks, rumbles and runs? ~ Maximus Freeman
Koan quotes by Maximus Freeman
To be a full-blooded hillbilly was to be a living koan. Half of you wanted to be dignified and half of you couldn't tolerate any restraint. You could see it in the regional art and hear it in the music. Wood carving with chainsaws. Cloggers who danced up a storm with the lower half of their bodies, but held the upper half perfectly still and stared off into the distance stone-faced. Or a group of bluegrass musicians who'd be playing the most raucous tunes imaginable, looking around at each other with bemused expressions that seemed to say where's all that racket comin from?
Phoebe believed that nearly all the adult males everywhere were pretty much the same way. Most of them could manage to keep the top half of themselves under a semblance of control, but the bottom half tended to run wild. As she continued to descend the trail she couldn't help but think that most men were mentally ill below the waist. ~ Carolyn Jourdan
Koan quotes by Carolyn Jourdan
The principle of avoiding conflict and never opposing an aggressor's strength head-on is the essence of aikido. We apply the same principle to problems that arise in life. The skilled aikidoist is as elusive as the truth of Zen; he makes himself into a koan - a puzzle which slips away the more one tries to solve it. He is like water in that he falls through the fingers of those who try to clutch him. Water does not hesitate before it yields, for the moment the fingers begin to close it moves away, not of its own strength, but by using the pressure applied to it. It is for this reason, perhaps, that one of the symbols for aikido is water. ~ Joe Hyams
Koan quotes by Joe Hyams
Robert calmly, like an Oriental sage himself, treated the situation as if it were a koan, a riddle to be entered until its very assumptions shifted. ~ Mark Nepo
Koan quotes by Mark Nepo
And what we've been always been is ... ?"
"Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who's paying for it, who's starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs ... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead."
After a while, "You're not going to explain that, or ... "
"Course not, it's a koan. ~ Thomas Pynchon
Koan quotes by Thomas Pynchon
When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me. ~ Jack Gilbert
Koan quotes by Jack Gilbert
I had worked for a newspaper of sorts, word got around, and I became editor of our local school newspaper, The Drum. I don't recall being given any choice in this matter; I think I was simply appointed. My second-in-command, Danny Emond, had even less interest in the paper than I did. Danny just liked the idea that Room 4, where we did our work, was near the girls' bathroom. "Someday I'll just go crazy and hack my way in there, Steve," he told me on more than one occasion. "Hack, hack, hack." Once he added, perhaps in an effort to justify himself: "The prettiest girls in school pull up their skirts in there." This struck me as so fundamentally stupid it might actually be wise, like a Zen Koan or an early story by John Updike. ~ Stephen King
Koan quotes by Stephen King
Wisteria hangs over the eaves like clumps of ghostly grapes. Euphorbia's pale blooms billow like sea froth. Blood grass twists upward, knifing the air, while underground its roots go berserk, goosing everything in their path. A magnolia, impatient with vulvic flesh, erupts in front of the living room window. The recovering terrorist
holding a watering can filled with equal parts fish fertilizer and water, paisley gloves right up over her freckled forearms, a straw hat with its big brim shading her eyes, old tennis shoes speckled with dew
moves through her front garden. Her face, she tells herself, like a Zen koan. The look of one lip smiling. ~ Zsuzsi Gartner
Koan quotes by Zsuzsi Gartner
I select people to work more closely when they are prepared to and I see that. They don't have to tell me. I know. I will give them a task of some type, and that task becomes the koan between us. ~ Frederick Lenz
Koan quotes by Frederick Lenz
I stood facing the horizon over the East Sea.
What had become of the seventeen hundred
koan-riddles?
The sound of waves
the sound of waves.
Playing with you I threw them away. ~ Ko Un
Koan quotes by Ko Un
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same? ~ Erwin Schrodinger
Koan quotes by Erwin Schrodinger
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free. ~ Peter Matthiessen
Koan quotes by Peter Matthiessen
Sanity and enlightenment ... I've been reading a new book Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries, and it contains a commentary on Genjo Koan by Shunryu Suzuki, the author who wrote Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He doesn't mention sanity at all but I think that one possible definition of enlightenment would be a kind of profound sanity, where being insane is no longer an option. ~ Brad Warner
Koan quotes by Brad Warner
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.'
'You do, then, fall in love.'
'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there's waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start. ~ Iris Murdoch
Koan quotes by Iris Murdoch
Beanpaste that smells like beanpaste is no good. ~ Zen Koan
Koan quotes by Zen Koan
It isn't that we're alone or not alone
whose voice do you want mine? yours? ~ Ikkyu
Koan quotes by Ikkyu
The O. Henry has become lingua franca among writers for saying, 'That guy can write a story.' It's prestigious, respected, coveted, dreamed about. It's very satisfying to be included in this group of writers. Here's a koan: Could O. Henry win an O. Henry? ~ Tony D'Souza
Koan quotes by Tony D'Souza
[Once Ummon asked a lesser light Are you a gardener> Yes it replied Why have turnips no roots> Ummon asked the gardener who could not reply Because said Ummon rainwater is plentiful] I think about this for a moment. Ummon's koan is not difficult now that I am regaining the knack of listening for the shadow of substance beneath the words. The little Zen parable is Ummon's way of saying, with some sarcasm, that the answer lies within science and within the antilogic which scientific answers so often provide. The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. ~ Dan Simmons
Koan quotes by Dan Simmons
When you paint Spring, do not paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots, but just paint Spring. To paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots is to paint willows, plums, peaches, or apricots - it is not yet painting Spring. ~ Dogen
Koan quotes by Dogen
The question was how you ignored someone's request to be left alone - even if it meant jeopardizing the friendship. It was a wretched little koan: How can you help someone who won't be helped while realizing that if you don't try to help, then you're not being a friend at all? ~ Hanya Yanagihara
Koan quotes by Hanya Yanagihara
In the past, kong-an (koan) practicing meant checking someone's enlightenment. Now we use kong-ans to make our lives correct ... You must use kong-ans to take away your opinions. When you take away your opinions, your mind is clear like space, which means from moment to moment you can reflect any situation and respond correctly and meticulously. ~ Seungsahn
Koan quotes by Seungsahn
Who does the sky weep for, when it rains?"
Baldasshi Koan

"If we knew, the sky would not weep. ~ Aldous Mercer
Koan quotes by Aldous Mercer
Hearing a crow with no mouth
Cry in the deep
Darkness of the night,
I feel a longing for
My father before he was born. ~ Ikkyu
Koan quotes by Ikkyu
Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. ~ Carl Sagan
Koan quotes by Carl Sagan
We're lost where the mind can't find us
utterly lost ~ Ikkyu
Koan quotes by Ikkyu
Zen has lost its zip, if you will, or its nothingness and has become ritualistic Its established in monastaries with strict codes of koan study. ~ Frederick Lenz
Koan quotes by Frederick Lenz
Zhaozhou often quoted this saying by Sengcan: "The great way is not difficult if you just don't pick and choose. ~ John Tarrant
Koan quotes by John   Tarrant
You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,
The crackle of their funeral pyres, ~ Dick Allen
Koan quotes by Dick Allen
That stone Buddha deserves all the
birdshit it gets
I wave my skinny arms like a tall
flower in the wind ~ Ikkyu
Koan quotes by Ikkyu
I'd love to give you something
but what would help? ~ Ikkyu
Koan quotes by Ikkyu
As I see it, every love has in the beginning a ray of light in it, but the lovers destroy that. They jump on that ray of light with all their darkness within. They jump on it and they destroy it. When it is destroyed they think it was false. They have killed it! It was not false --- they are false. The ray was real, true. ~ Osho, Love, Freedom, And Aloneness : The Koan Of Relationship
Koan quotes by Osho, Love, Freedom, And Aloneness :  The Koan Of Relationship
If the Zen master sees that it will cause a person to progress, he will ask that person to do a task. The task is charged with power if it's performed properly. It's a koan between yourself and the Zen Master. ~ Frederick Lenz
Koan quotes by Frederick Lenz
Sex koan #14: The secret to sex is having some. ~ A. Aimee
Koan quotes by A. Aimee
Apricots Quotes «
» April May Quotes