"I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, "That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation."
"The menu is not the meal."
"Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone."
"We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society."
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself."
"This is the real secret of life - to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
"You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing."
"To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float."
"Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth."
"Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command."
"The art of living...is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive."
"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes."
"Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present."
"The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion."
"A scholar tries to learn something everyday; A student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily."
"The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless."
"Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know."
"I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is."
"How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god."
"So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself."
"The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance."
"Try to imagine what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up... now try to imagine what it was like to wake up having never gone to sleep."
"Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter."
"We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."
"It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually - if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning-- you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as - Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so - I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it."
"Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations."
"You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean."
"When we attempt to exercise power or control over someone else, we cannot avoid giving that person the very same power or control over us."
"Really, the fundamental, ultimate mystery - the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets - is this: that for every outside there is an inside and for every inside there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together."
"Most of us assume as a matter of common sense that space is nothing, that it's not important and has no energy. But as a matter of fact, space is the basis of existence. How could you have stars without space? Stars shine out of space and something comes out of nothing just in the same way as when you listen, in an unprejudiced way, you hear all sounds coming out of silence. It is amazing. Silence is the origin of sound just as space is the origin of stars, and woman is the origin of man. If you listen and pay close attention to what is, you will discover that there is no past, no future, and no one listening. You cannot hear yourself listening. You live in the eternal now and you are that. It is really extremely simple, and that is the way it is."
"Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly."
"Like love, the light or guidance of truth that influences us exists only in living form, not in principles or rules or expectations or advice, however widely circulated."
"The religious idea of God cannot do full duty for the metaphysical infinity."
"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance - lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt."
"Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it is not clock or calendar time. It has no urgency. It happens to be timeless time. I know that I am listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years, and it takes me out of a world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks for some reason or other always seem to be marching, and, as with armies, marching is never to anything but doom. But in the motion of waves there is no marching rhythm. It harmonizes with our very breathing. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains. It is the breathing of eternity, like the God Brahma of Indian mythology inhaling and exhaling, manifesting and dissolving the worlds, forever. As a mere conception this might sound appallingly monotonous, until you come to listen to the breaking and washing of waves."
"For there is a growing apprehension that existence is a rat-race in a trap: living organisms, including people,are merely tubes which put things in at one end and let them out at the other, which both keeps them doing it and in the long run wears them out. So to keep the farce going, the tubes find ways of making new tubes, which also put things in at one end and let them out at the other. At the input end they even develop ganglia of nerves called brains, with eyes and ears, so that they can more easily scrounge around for things to swallow. As and when they get enough to eat, they use up their surplus energy by wiggling in complicated patterns, making all sorts of noises by blowing air in and out of the input hole, and gathering together in groups to fight with other groups. In time, the tubes grow such an abundance of attached appliances that they are hardly recognizable as mere tubes, and they manage to do this in a staggering variety of forms. There is a vague rule not to eat tubes of your own form, but in general there is serious competition as to who is going to be the top type of tube. All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd."
"People become concerned with being more humble than other people."
"Here's an example: someone says, 'Master, please hand me the knife,' and he hands them the knife, blade first. 'Please give me the other end,' he says. and the master replies, 'What would you do with the other end?" This is answering an everyday matter in terms of the metaphysical.<br />
<br />
When the question is, 'Master, what is the fundamental principle of buddhism?' then he replies, 'There is enough breeze in this fan to keep me cool.' that is answering the metaphysical in terms of the everyday, and that is, more or less, the principle Zen works on. The mundane and the sacred are one and the same."
"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas (a kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."
"I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination."
"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence."
"Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences."
"We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if a decision itself were voluntary every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide - an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur. Oddly enough, if we had to decide to decide, we would not be free to decide."
"But I'll tell you what hermits realize. If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything."
"Hospitals should be arranged in such a way as to make being sick an interesting experience. One learns a great deal sometimes from being sick. "
"But the transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-tzu said, 'The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.'"
"What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are 'coins' for real things."
"Normally, we do not so much look at things as overlook them."
"Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe."
"In reality there are no separate events. Life moves along like water, it's all connected to the source of the river is connected to the mouth and the ocean."
"You will never get to the irreducible definition of anything because you will never be able to explain why you want to explain, and so on. The system will gobble itself up."
"Belief...is the insistence that the truth is what one would 'lief' or (will or) wish to be...Faith is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go...faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception."
"The morning glory which blooms for an hour differs not at heart from the giant pine, which lives for a thousand years."
"Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure - attractively packaged but inferior in content."
"We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean 'waves', the universe 'peoples'. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe."
"Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer is produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree 'apples'. That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!"
"I have always thought that all philosophical debates are ultimately between the partisans of structure and the partisans of 'goo'."
"Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way."
"Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
"If you cannot trust yourself, you cannot even trust your mistrust of yourself - so that without this underlying trust in the whole system of nature you are simply paralyzed."
"One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt."
"And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words...As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning."
"Jesus Christ knew he was God. So wake up and find out eventually who you really are. In our culture, of course, they'll say you're crazy and you're blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in a nut house (which is pretty much the same thing). However if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, 'My goodness, I've just discovered that I'm God,' they'll laugh and say, 'Oh, congratulations, at last you found out.'"
"But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything - including 'my' thoughts and actions - were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that 'I make them'; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites."
"We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas."
"One's life is an act with no actor, and thus it has always been recognized that the insane man that has lost his mind is a parody of the sage who has transcended his ego. If one is paranoid, the other is metanoid."
"Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior."
"You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes."
"Make a spurious division of one process into two, forget that you have done it, and then puzzle for centuries as to how the two get together."
"Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience."
"The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality, and the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it and talk about it and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other there is a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols, all civilization depends on them, but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth."
"A successful college president once complained to me, I'm so busy that I'm going to have to get a helicopter! Well, I answered, you'll be ahead so long as you're the only president who has one. But don't get it. Everyone will expect more out of you."
Alan Watts