It Came from Beyond Zen! Quotes

“As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. We are watching all our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dogen saw his world fall apart when his parents died. Religions don’t seem to mean much anymore, except maybe to small groups of fanatics. You can hardly get a full-time job, and even if you do, there’s no stability. A college degree means very little. The Internet has leveled things so much that the opinions of the greatest scientists in the world about global climate change are presented as being equal to those of some dude who read part of the Bible and took it literally. The news industry has collapsed so that it’s hard to tell a fake headline from a real one. Money isn’t money anymore; it’s numbers stored in computers. Everything is changing so rapidly that none of us can hope to keep up. All this uncertainty has a lot of us scrambling for something certain to hang on to. But if you think I’m gonna tell you that Dogen provides us with that certainty, think again. He actually gives us something far more useful. Dogen gives us a way to be okay with uncertainty. This isn’t just something Buddhists need; it’s something we all need. We humans can be certainty junkies. We’ll believe in the most ridiculous nonsense to avoid the suffering that comes from not knowing something. It’s like part of our brain is dedicated to compulsive dot-connecting. I think we’re wired to want to be certain. You have to know if that’s a rope or a snake, if the guy with the chains all over his chest is a gangster or a fan of bad seventies movies. Being certain means being safe. The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff. Dogen is interesting because he tries to cut right to the heart of this. He gets into what is real and what is not. Probably the main reason he’s so difficult to read is that Dogen is trying to say things that can’t actually be said. So he has to bend language to the point where it almost breaks. He’s often using language itself to show the limitations of language. Even the very first readers of his writings must have found them difficult. Dogen understood both that words always ultimately fail to describe reality and that we human beings must rely on words anyway. So he tried to use words to write about that which is beyond words. This isn’t really a discrepancy. You use words, but you remain aware of their limitations. My teacher used to say, “People like explanations.” We do. They’re comforting. When the explanation is reasonably correct, it’s useful.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“There is no ultimate arbiter of right or wrong. In the whole vast universe, there is nobody who knows what you should do in any given situation any better than you do — not your mom and dad, not your best friend Alice, not the president or the pope, and certainly not God.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Dumb-bunnies think that if they don’t understand the dharma or memorize it, then there’s no benefit to even hearing it. They think that the best thing is to pursue knowledge and that if they forget what they’ve learned they might as well not have learned it at all.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Often statues depicting the Buddha’s moment of enlightenment show him touching the ground. This symbolizes that his enlightened state included a firm grounding in this reality instead of serving as an escape from it.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“it’s still absurd from a Buddhist standpoint to say the mountain on which the old man / wild fox met Hyakujo is the same one that existed millions of years ago. Yet there is still some kind of continuity from the past to the present, and we all know that.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Water, foam, and flame are mind. Flowers in the spring and the moon in the autumn are also mind. Each moment is mind. And yet mind can never be destroyed. That’s why everything that’s real is mind, and the Buddhas along with other Buddhas are mind.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“In Buddhist theory, action exists first and because action happens, the people and things that do that action appear. It’s weird, I know.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Echu says the insentient explain the dharma all the time. “All the time” means they actually explain it at every real moment. There’s no break in their explanation. Real explanations always happen without any break.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“So Buddhism is not the worship of a guy named Buddha; it’s learning to manifest your unique inner Buddha.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“You’re mistaken if you think we move from birth to death. Birth is a single moment that happens at the time of birth. It has its own past and its own future. That’s why we Buddhists say birth isn’t really birth, or appearance isn’t really appearance. Death, too, is a single moment that happens at the time of death. It also has its own past and its own future. That’s why we Buddhists say disappearance isn’t really disappearance, or death isn’t really death.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“When you’re alive there’s nothing but life. When you die there’s nothing but death. So when life comes, be alive. When death comes, die. You don’t need to dodge either one, and you don’t need to long for either one.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“It’s easy to become a Buddha. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t get hung up on life and death. Have compassion for everybody and everything. Show some respect to people who deserve it and kindness to people who need it. Don’t get all caught up in hating stuff or in wanting stuff. Don’t think too much. Don’t worry. That’s what we call being a Buddha. You don’t need anything else.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“The life of a Zen master is eating cornflakes and doing the dishes. From the distant past up till today, that’s what the masters have all taught.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Even as bad as it often gets, we are further along than Dogen could probably have envisioned in his day. I don’t know how long it will take to finally get there, but, like Dogen, I believe it is possible.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“We think we’re doing our jobs for the paycheck, but Dogen says that’s an illusion. The underlying, original reason we work is to give to others. The payment you receive is a kind of karmic payback for the service you give.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“According to Buddhist philosophy, nothing ever really belongs to you. Even so, you can still give stuff away.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“I vow to save all beings ...from myself.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“I sincerely believe that someday the world will be a place of peace and plenty because all human beings will have learned to save the world from themselves.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“We always look for meaning outside of what we do. But the real meaning of anything we do, or anything we are, is not something imposed from outside. It’s not an explanation. The meaning is the thing itself.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Don’t waste any time during the day. What you do right now becomes the seeds for raising up the next crop of wise people. Putting everyone at ease by doing your job well is how you transform yourself and everybody else.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“We eat living food. Through our food we learn constantly how to live on this earth. We are constantly supported by all phenomenal currents of life; we are lived by all beings. That is the truth. We are lived by whom and whatever we take, by their teachings that guide us. One way to live is to show all of their natures through our existence. It is different from our usual way of continuously exploring our capacities for what we really want to do.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Religions say that spirit/mind is real while matter is negligible. Materialistic philosophies, such as classical science, say that mind is just an illusion caused by the interactions of material objects and processes. Contemporary physics is starting to dimly comprehend that this distinction is false, but it will probably take a long time before this view becomes widely accepted. This is much more than just a dry philosophical debate. People get killed over this stuff.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Dogen takes the basic premise of Buddhism to its ultimate conclusion. And he does so fearlessly. He doesn’t accept any doctrine without question. He is the ultimate skeptic — he’s skeptical even of himself, his own senses, and his own conclusions. That kind of attitude would paralyze most people. Yet Dogen manages to take that skepticism and turn it into something that’s freeing rather than paralyzing. It’s also a very contemporary attitude. As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“If we can find a way as a society to integrate these two opposing outlooks, we’ll no longer have to fight about them. Right now we deal with the contradictions between science and religion by allowing them to operate in completely separate arenas. The Buddhist outlook allows us to fully integrate them. I don’t think this integration will happen for a few hundred years, at least. By then Buddhism will probably no longer be called “Buddhism” and won’t have much connection to ancient Indian cosmology and mythology. But I think future historians will see the connection between Buddhism and a more fully integrated and realistic view of life.”
― Brad Warner, It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master