Nine-Headed Dragon River Quotes

“Zen has been called the "religion before religion," which is to say that anyone can practice, including those committed to another faith. And that phrase evokes that natural religion of our early childhood, when heaven and a splendorous earth were one. But soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions.

Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn.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, at the bottom of each breath, there is a hollow place filled with longing. We become seekers without knowing that we seek, and at first, we long for something "greater" than ourselves, something apart and far away.

It is not a return to childhood, for childhood is not a truly enlightened state. Yet to seek one's own true nature is "a way to lead you to your long lost home." To practice Zen means to realize one's existence moment after moment, rather than letting life unravel in regret of the past and daydreaming of the future. To "rest in the present" is a state of magical simplicity...out of the emptiness can come a true insight into our natural harmony all creation.

To travel this path, one need not be a 'Zen Buddhist', which is only another idea to be discarded like 'enlightenment,' and like 'the Buddha' and like 'God.”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals, 1969-1982

“Nothing exists but atoms and the void”—so wrote Democritus. And it is “void” that underlies the Eastern teachings—not emptiness or absence, but the Uncreated that preceded all creation, the beginningless potential of all things.”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982

“Dark, blowing clouds of snow over the mountain, and a snowy sunlight in the skeletal hickories—how do you like these common miracles!”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982

“That American [Philip Kapleau] was asking us whether it is possible for him to attain enlightenment in one week of sesshin. Tell him this for me: don’t say days, weeks, years, or even lifetimes. Tell him to vow to attain enlightenment though it take the infinite, the boundless, the incalculable future.4”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982

“The Zen expression “Kill the Buddha!” means to kill any concept of the Buddha as something apart from oneself. To kill the Buddha is to be the Buddha.”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982

“Religion is not to go to God by forsaking the world but to find Him in it.”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982

“sound”
― Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982