A Taste of Zen (Part 2)

Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day… we become seekers.

—PETER MATTHIESSEN

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

—EMPEDOCLES

The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell. And therefore, if you want to discover nature’s nakedness, you must destroy its symbols, and the farther you get in the nearer you come to its essence. When you come to the One that gathers all things up into itself, there your soul must stay.

—MEISTER ECKHART

Zen is the unsymbolization of the world.

—R.H. BLYTH

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

—YASUTANI ROSHI

We see men haying far in the meadow, their heads waving like the grass they cut. In the distance, the wind seemed to bend all alike.

—THOREAU