Every day, priests minutely examine the Teachings
And endlessly chant complicated sutras.
Before doing that, though, they should learn
How to read the love letters sent by
The wind and rain, the snow and moon.
Ikkyu, Zen Buddhist monk and poet, 1394–1481
[There are} things that ordinarily you would never dream of being able to tolerate, and having no motivation to in fact tolerate. And then, here is a place where not only can it be tolerated on the surface, but it actually turns out that you don’t need to tolerate it. . . . you can actually welcome it and simply let it be as it is, and then not generate a big story of “this is killing me” and so forth.
That was just one … particular moment. but it showed me something that I’ve never really forgotten, which is that it’s possible to turn towards what you most want to run away from. And then the whole landscape changes when you do that, because there was something in you, in me, that was recognizing that that sensation was not my sensation. And therefore I was already free of it in that moment. It’s not like I had to tolerate it and get good at grinning and bearing it and then it would go away. But no, at its most intense, I can be equanimous about it. And it wasn’t a thought, it was a direct experience.
Jon Kabat Zinn’s insight during a silent retreat which led him to apply mindfulness meditation to mainstream medicine
The true purpose [of Zen] is to see things as they are,
to observe things as they are,
and to let everything go as it goes…
Shunryu Suzuki roshi, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
What you look hard at
seems to look hard at you.
Gerald Manley Hopkins
You should speak appropriately about the affairs of your own life,
for each matter you encounter
constitutes the meaning of your existence.
Mazu Daoyi, 709–88, renowned ancient Chinese Zen master
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand;
the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
George Eliot
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