Sublime

Yet this is why the Western mind is dismayed when ordered conceptions of the universe break down, and when the basic behavior of the physical world is found to be a “principle of uncertainty.” We find such a world meaningless and inhuman, but familiarity with Chinese and Japanese art forms might lead us to an altogether new appreciation of this wor

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. Absence of hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the n

Past things are in the past and do not go there from the present, and present things are in the present, and do not go there from the past.…

To put it less poetically–human experience is determined as much by the nature of the mind and the structure of its senses as by the external objects whose presence the mind reveals. Men feel themselves to be victims or puppets of their experience because they separate “themselves” from their minds, thinking that the nature of the mind-body is some

we can observe the freedom and naturalness of Zen without loss of perspective. Social conditioning fosters the identification of the mind with a fixed idea of itself as the means of self-control, and as a result man thinks of himself as “I”–the ego. Thereupon the mental center of gravity shifts from the spontaneous or original mind to the ego image

Alan Watts: “There is a contradiction in our desire to be secure in a universe whose very nature is fluidity and movement...If I want to be secure, that is, protected from the flux of life, I am wanting to be separate from life. Yet, it is this very sense of separateness that makes me feel insecure. In other words, the more security I can get, the

Bankei (1622–1693) was a contemporary of Hakuin and for some time roshi at the Myoshinji monastery in Kyoto. Translations of his informal talks on Zen, directed especially to lay people, may be found in D. T. Suzuki’s Living by Zen (Pasadena, Calif.: P. D. and Ione Perkins, 1949), and in Lucien Stryk, ed., World of the Buddha (New York: Doubleday &

Things are produced around us, but no one knows the whence. They issue forth, but no one sees the portal. Men one and all value that part of knowledge which is known. They do not know how to avail themselves of the Unknown in order to reach knowledge. Is not this misguided?4