The Lady and the Monk Quotes

“None of the things in life - like love or faith - was arrived at by thinking; indeed, one could almost define the things that mattered as the ones that came as suddenly as thunder.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As I wandered around the room, with Sachiko by my side, I began to think how much we need space in those we love, space enough to accommodate growth and possibility. Knowledge must leave room for mystery; intimacy, taken too far, was the death of imagination. Keeping some little distance from her was, I thought, a way of keeping an open space, a silence for the imagination to fill.
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things," Thoreau had written, "we require that all things be mysterious and unexplainable.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“If you are not happy, act the happy man. Happiness will come later. If you are in despair, act as though you believe. Faith will come afterwards.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“When you're hurrying around too quickly," he had said, "there's a part of the world you can't see. If, for example, you're taking a wrong direction in your life, it's only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. Then message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we've got to learn to stop.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“And just as it is common to hear how, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love—our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything—so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it. Suddenly, everything I saw or read, in this girlish city of temples, seemed to take me back to the theme of the lady and the monk.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“The ultimate purpose of Zen," I remembered the röshi telling me, "is not in the going away from the world but in the coming back. Zen is not just a matter of gaining enlightenment; it's a matter of acting in a world of love and compassion.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“Marriage she clearly regarded as a businesslike proposition - a matter of domestic deals and daily accounts in which emotions where as irrelevant as love songs in a resume, now, though, as the Heian courtiers had it, and find all the sensations she kept so neatly in her head, of "First love" and "True love" and even "Lost love".”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“What avails monastic aspirations when, as Mark had said, religious geniuses were born and not made? Could not renouncing the world be a form of self-indulgence? Was not monasticism, in the end, as much an act of cowardice as courage?”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“To do what I want, and not to do what I won't - this is why I entered such a life.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As I wandered back in the dying light, lit up with a sense of rapture and of calm, I remembered the line of the poet Shinsho, 'No matter what road I'm traveling, I'm going home.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As I wandered back in the dying light, lit up with a sense of rapture and of calm, I remembered the line of the poet Shinsho, 'No matter what road I'm travelling, I'm going home.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“I thought back then to what the abbot of Tofukuji had said, explaining how even a businessman or journalist had something to gain from a night in a monastery, and a taste of stillness. One had to learn how not to spend time, he had suggested. 'When you're hurrying around too quickly,' he had said, 'there's a part of the world you can't see. If, for example, you're taking a wrong direction in your life, it's only when you stop and look at things clearly that you can revise your direction and take a more proper course. The message of Zen is that in order to find ourselves, we've got to learn to stop.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“Don't worry, Sachiko,' I said with glib assurance, not even really persuading myself. 'Worry doesn't help; it only clouds or distorts. If you can solve a problem, there's no need to worry; and if you can't, there's nothing gained by worry. Just stay calm, and there's nothing you can't do.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“The words we could not share left us more room for ourselves.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“the Japanese word for 'spinach,' she said, was a homonym for their word for 'secret love'. Thus, ever since the Heian period, giving someone a present wrapped in a bag of spinach-green had been the most eloquent way of giving him one's heart.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“Autumn seemed much deeper than spring, as sadness is deeper than brief joy, or memory than hope”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“Marriage she clearly regarded as a businesslike proposition - a matter of domestic deals and daily accounts in which emotions where as irrelevant as love songs in a resume, now, though, as the Heiab courtiers had it, and find all the sensations she kept so neatly in her head, of "First love" and "True love" and even "Lost love".”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As it is common to hear now, when one is in love, anything one sees reminds one of that love - our feelings remake the world in a secular equivalent of the faith that sees the hand of God in everything - so I began to find that when one is thinking on a theme, everything seems to reflect on it.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way, Ikkyū had been a patron - and a laureate - of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, "Crazy Cloud", had played subversively on the fact that "cloud water" was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet "cloud rain" was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the "red thread" ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks - since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of "no min" - while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as "Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk's skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil"; taken another way, it meant: "That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk's skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be utterly spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku or in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“In sumi-e, he said, as in haiku aur in any Zen training, the aim was to develop a discipline so sure and a spirit so true that one could afford to be atleast spontaneous; to get into such a state of deliberateness that as soon as one put pen to paper, one would produce something powerful and true.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“both characters had given up what they held dearest, the very basis of their lives — their premises — for a woman, and then had found in her a kind of saving grace. They had opened themselves up and, in the opening, found a transformation. In the pretty pun of C. S. Lewis, they had been “surprised by joy.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto