China Root Quotes

“In bare philosophical outline, meditation begins with the practice of sitting quietly, attending to the rise and fall of breath, and watching thoughts similarly appear and disappear in a field of silent emptiness. From this attention to thought’s movement comes meditation’s first revelation: that we are not, as a matter of observable fact, our thoughts and memories. That is, we are not that center of identity we assume ourselves to be in our day-to-day lives, that identity-center defining us as fundamentally separate from the empirical Cosmos. Instead, we are an empty awareness that can watch identity rehearsing itself in thoughts and memories relentlessly coming and going. Suddenly, and in a radical way, Ch’an’s demolition of concepts and assumptions has begun. And it continues as meditation practice deepens.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“All day long, year in and year out, that Presence fills our mirror-deep minds, whispering all its silence through us, replacing meaning/thought with the elemental beauty of meaninglessness, the clarity of the ten thousand things.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“Absence is all existence seen as one undifferentiated tissue (reality, as we have seen, prior to our names), while Presence is that same tissue seen in its differentiated forms, the ten thousand things (reality differentiated by our names). And it should also be emphasized that both terms, Absence and Presence, are primarily verbal in Chinese: hence, that tissue of reality is seen as verbal, rather than the static nominal: a tissue that is alive and in motion.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“In Ch’an, the process of thoughts appearing and disappearing manifests Taoism’s generative cosmology, reveals it there within the mind. And with this comes the realization that the cosmology of Absence and Presence defines consciousness too, where thoughts are forms of Presence emerging from and vanishing back into Absence, exactly as the ten thousand things of the empirical world do. That is, consciousness is part of the same cosmological tissue as the empirical world, with thoughts emerging from the same generative emptiness as the ten thousand things.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen

“And so, there is nothing to practice because we are always already enlightened, always already Absence somehow open to the world.”
― David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen