Fingers Pointing - Birds Singing by Ron FLowers - HTML preview

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     Ryokan

 

Silence is the essential condition of happiness.                    Heinrich Heine

 

The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud.

The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain.

All day long they depend on each other, without being dependent on each other.

The white cloud is always the white cloud.

The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.

     Dogen

 

You learn to honor everybody you meet as your teacher. You begin to see that everything in your universe becomes your teaching – showing you where you’re holding on to models, where you’re conscious and where you’re still asleep.

     Ram Dass

 

The world is impermanent. One should constantly remember death.

     Sri Ramakrishna

 

Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way. This is the mystery. When you understand one thing through and through you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.

     Shunryu Suzuki

 

Since everything is but an apparition, perfect in being what it is, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may well burst into laughter.

     Long Chen Pa

 

Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them.          Alan Watts

 

As one lamp serves to dispel a thousand years of darkness, so one flash of wisdom destroys ten thousand years of ignorance.

     Hui-neng

 

Just remain in the center, watching. And then forget that you are there.

     Lao-tzu

               

Only the paradox comes anywhere near to the comprehending fullness of life.

     C. G. Jung

 

Wherever you are is the entry point!                              Kabir

     

We cannot see things as they really are until we let go of the idea of a separate self.

     John Daido Loori

 

I have discovered that all of man’s unhappiness derives from only one source – not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.

     Pascal

 

The various forms of Buddhist meditation…are experimental techniques for changing consciousness, and the thing that they are mainly concerned with is helping human beings to get rid of the hallucination that each one of us is a skin-encapsulated ego – a little man inside our head located between the ears and behind the eyes who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behavior.

     Alan Watts

 

‘I have done my best.’ That is about all the philosophy of living that one needs.

     Lin Yutang

 

If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.

     Shunryu Suzuki

 

 

Illusion is the only reality.                                   Gustave Flaubert

 

I do not cut my life up into days but my days into lives, each hour, an entire life.

     Juan Ramon Jimenez

 

The mind precedes all things, the mind dominates all things, the mind creates all things.

     The Buddha

 

When a bell rings it is only the bell listening to the sound of the bell, Or to put it another way, it is the sound of yourself ringing. This is the moment of enlightenment.

     Yasutani-roshi

 

You can’t ‘get’ wisdom. You and ‘get’ knowledge, but you can only ‘be’ wise.

     Ram Dass

     

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.          William James

 

Anything we fully do is an alone journey.                         Natalie Goldberg    

 

When the old plum tree blooms, the entire world blooms.               Dogen                             

All of you should realize that your own mind is Buddha, that is, this mind is Buddha’s Mind …. Those who seek for the Truth should realize that there is nothing to seek. There is no Buddha but Mind, there is no Mind but Buddha.

     Ma Tzu

 

Nothing in the voice of the cicada

Intimates how soon it will die.