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the Buddhist principle of the “Great Void.”
Zen is above all an experience, nonverbal in character, which is simply inaccessible to the purely literary and scholarly approach.
Those who know do not speak; Those who speak do not know.
words are ultimately futile,
“Come and find out for yourself.”
Only when you stop liking and disliking Will all be clearly understood. A split hair’s difference,
If you want to get the plain truth, Be not concerned with right and wrong. The conflict between right and wrong Is the sickness of the mind.
To see this is to see that good without evil is like up without down, and that to make an ideal of pursuing the good is like trying to get rid of the left by turning constantly to the right. One is therefore compelled to go round in circles.3
how hard it is to think in any other terms than good or bad, or a muddy mixture of the two.
knowing that life is not a situation from which there is anything to be grasped or gained–as
To eat is to survive to be hungry.
We do not sweat because it is hot; the sweating is the heat.
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
We feel that our actions are voluntary when they follow a decision, and involuntary when they happen without decision. But if decision itself were voluntary, every decision would have to be preceded by a decision to decide-an infinite regression which fortunately does not occur.
The relativity of time and motion is one of the principal themes of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, where he writes:
the strange sense of timeless moments which arises when one is no longer trying to resist the flow of events, the peculiar stillness and self-sufficiency of the succeeding instants when the mind is, as it were, going along with them and not trying to arrest them.
Today it is from sixty-five to seventy years, but subjectively the years are faster, and death, when it comes, is always all too soon. As Dogen said:
The flowers depart when we hate to lose them; The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow.
Thus there are the fish, the water, and life, and all three create each other.
This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.
