Self-renunciation, self-acceptance—these are all names for the same thing, for the ideal to which there is no road, the art for which there is no technique. — *location: 181* ^ref-16665 --- We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, for they fail to reach that inaccessible center of our selfhood which is trying to do the accepting or the rejecting. The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point. — *location: 186* ^ref-40251 --- But the reason why the idea of self-renunciation appears in the impossible form of a precept is that it is a form of what Buddhists would call upaya—a Sanskrit term meaning “skillful means,” and more particularly the skillful means employed by a teacher to awaken his student to some truth which can only be reached in a roundabout way. For the selfishness of the self thrives on the notion that it can command itself, that it is the lord and master of its own processes, of its own motives and desires. Thus the one important result of any really serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. And this precisely is that death to oneself which is the improbable source of a way of life so new and so alive that it feels like having been born again. In this metaphorical sense, the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity, its inability to make any difference to itself that is really important. That is why, in Zen Buddhism, the task of self-transcendence is likened to a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull, and, in the words of one of the old masters, the transforming death comes about at the very moment when the iron hide of the bull finally and absolutely rejects the mosquito’s frail proboscis. — *location: 189* ^ref-4550 --- Thus what I have called the death of the ego transpires in the moment when it is discovered and admitted that these ultimate feelings are irresistible. They are ultimate in two senses: one, that they sometimes have to do with very fundamental and cataclysmic events, and, two, that they are sometimes our deepest, most radical feeling with respect to a given situation—such as the basic frustration provoked by a conflict between sorrow and shame. The point is that these ultimate feelings are as wise as all the rest, and their wisdom emerges when we give up resisting them—through the realization that we are simply unable to do so. When, for example, life compels us at last to give in, to surrender to the full play of what is ordinarily called the terror of the unknown, the suppressed feeling suddenly shoots upward as a fountain of the purest joy. What was formerly felt as the horror of our inevitable mortality becomes transformed by an inner alchemy into an almost ecstatic sense of freedom from the bonds of individuality. But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child. — *location: 250* ^ref-33031 --- This willful, compulsive, moralistic approach to man’s transformation always obstructs it—for it still implies that very illusion of self-mastery which stands in the way. But it is just when I discover that I cannot surrender myself that I am surrendered; just when I find that I cannot accept myself that I am accepted. — *location: 260* ^ref-6450 --- IT HAS BEEN SAID THAT THE HIGHEST WISDOM lies in detachment, or, in the words of Chuang-tzu: ‘‘The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror; it grasps nothing; it refuses nothing; it receives, but does not keep.’’ — *location: 271* ^ref-45922 --- Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. In short, it is to be detached from both past and future and to live in the eternal Now. — *location: 272* ^ref-58803 --- You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now—otherwise you would not be here. Hence the infinite Tao is something which you can neither escape by flight nor catch by pursuit; there is no coming toward it or going away from it; it is, and you are it. So become what you are. — *location: 284* ^ref-24062 --- To use another Buddhist simile: The doctrine is like a finger pointing at the moon, and one must take care not to mistake the finger for the moon. Too many of us, I fear, suck the pointing finger of religion for comfort, instead of looking where it points. — *location: 300* ^ref-30624 --- the problem is the pain of trying to avoid suffering and the fear of trying not to be afraid. — *location: 427* ^ref-40349 --- Now this is an immensely important discovery. For it means that I have found out what I, what my ego, actually is—a result-seeking mechanism. Such a mechanism is rather a useful gadget when the results in question are things like food or shelter for the organism. But when the results which the mechanism seeks are not external objects but states of itself, such as happiness, the mechanism is all clutched-up. It is trying to lift itself up by its own bootstraps. — *location: 457* ^ref-492 --- There is, however, just this one possibility. It can realize the whole round circuit of the trap in which it lies. It can see the entire futility and self-contradiction of its position. And it can see that it can do nothing whatsoever to get itself out of it. And this realization of “I can do nothing” is precisely mui. One has mysteriously succeeded in doing nothing. — *location: 462* ^ref-28393 --- In Lao-tzu’s own words: “The universe is everlasting. The reason that the universe is everlasting is that it does not live for itself. Therefore it lasts. Therefore the sage puts himself behind, and finds himself in front, regards his person as outside himself, and his person is preserved. Is it not because he does not live for himself that he realizes himself?” — *location: 471* ^ref-43377 --- We have to see that there is no way. But in the state where we have realized that there is no way to be found, no result to be gained, the vicious circle breaks. Ouroboros, the snake eating his tail, has become conscious all the way round, and knows at last that that tail is the other end of his head. — *location: 480* ^ref-44213 --- For the world of form and illusion which the majority take to be the real world is none other than the play of the Spirit, or, as the Hindus have called it, the Dance of Shiva. He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. — *location: 505* ^ref-34732 --- Without exception, everything that we attain or create, even the memorials that survive our death, must perish without trace, and that our quest for permanence is pure futility. Because, furthermore, happiness exists only in relation to misery, pleasure in relation to pain, the perceptive man does not try to separate them. The relation is so inseparable that, in some sense, happiness is misery, and pleasure is—because it implies—pain. Realizing this, he learns to abandon all desire for any happiness separate from misery, or pleasure apart from pain. — *location: 551* ^ref-23510 --- If, then, I see that the desire for pleasure burns me by its implication of pain, I begin to desire not to desire, to desire nirvana, to seek to give up. In this, however, I have simply converted nirvana into another name for pleasure. — *location: 558* ^ref-40043 --- It is for this reason, then, that Buddhism suggests nirvana with terms that are negative and void, and not with the positive and desirable imagery which surrounds the notion of God. Nirvana is equated with Shunyata, the Nothing beyond nothing, to suggest that it is simply impossible to desire it. Whatever we are able to desire is still pleasure implying pain. Nirvana, release from suffering and desire, is called unattainable—not because it does not happen but because there is no way of seeking it. — *location: 561* ^ref-12135 --- Is it too impossible to admit that all our well-laid traps for happiness are just so many ways of kidding ourselves that by meditation, psychoanalysis, Dianetics, Raja Yoga, Zen Buddhism, or mental science, we are somehow going to save ourselves from that final plop into nothing? — *location: 583* ^ref-48759 --- To know that you can do nothing is the beginning. Lesson One is: “I give up.” What happens now? You find yourself in what is perhaps a rather unfamiliar state of mind. Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose. I should say nothing about what comes next. To hold out hope, to promise a result, spoils the whole thing. — *location: 586* ^ref-23836 --- We are all familiar with the many involuntary acts of the human body which never happen so long as we are trying to make them happen, so long as we are anxious about them—going to sleep, remembering a forgotten name, or, under certain circumstances, sexual excitation. Well, there is something like this which happens upon the sole condition that we are not trying to make it happen, that we have realized quite clearly that we cannot make it happen. In Zen, it is called satori, sudden awakening. — *location: 592* ^ref-52213 --- The more complete kind of mind, which can feel as well as think, remains to “indulge” the odd sense of mystery which comes from contemplating the fact that everything is at base something which cannot be known. Every statement which you make about this “something” turns out to be nonsense. And what is specially strange is that this unknowable something is also the basis of that which otherwise I know so intimately—myself. — *location: 719* ^ref-54903 --- Gödel has given us a clear mathematicological proof of the fact that no system can define its own axioms without self-contradiction, and, since Hilbert, modern mathematics employs the point as an entirely undefined concept. Just as the knife cuts other things, but not itself, so thought uses tools which define but cannot be defined; logical philosophy itself by no means escapes from this limitation. — *location: 811* ^ref-40417 --- Egotism is a fierce holding on to oneself; it is building oneself up in a haughty stronghold, refusing to join in the play of life, refusing to accept the eternal laws of change of movement to which all are subject. — *location: 907* ^ref-60693 --- In every initiation rite it was necessary to pass through that valley of the shadow where the neophyte comes face to face with the Dweller on the Threshold and all the most terrible powers of the psyche. But the rite could only be successful if he faced them with love, recognizing them as manifestations of the same Divinity which was his own true Self. By this love he broke their spell and became a true initiate. — *location: 1106* ^ref-24982 --- For this reason the rationalist, puritanical mind is a veneer above a muck-heap, an attempt to copy greatness by wearing its clothes. — *location: 1116* ^ref-4601 --- Thus imitation of the sage is often a device put up by the demons for our own destruction, for modem man simply does not realize that until he has been through the valley of the shadow his life is not his own. Until he looks within himself, seeks out his hidden pantheon and overcomes it by love (or what psychologists call “acceptance”), he remains its unwitting tool. — *location: 1132* ^ref-33107 --- The unenlightened man keeps a tight hold on himself because he is afraid of losing himself; he can trust neither circumstances nor his own human nature; he is terrified of being genuine, of accepting himself as he is and tries to deceive himself into the belief that he is as he wishes to be. But these are the wishes, the desires that bind him, and it was such desires as these that the Buddha described as the cause of human misery. — *location: 1225* ^ref-17068 --- To the fully enlightened man, Samsara is Nirvana; ordinary, everyday experience of the world of opposites is for him transformed into the supreme spiritual experience of deliverance or freedom. — *location: 1438* ^ref-12898 --- They found themselves in a spiritual impasse, unable to change themselves because the self that had to be changed was also the self that had to do the changing—a feat as impossible as kissing one’s own lips. — *location: 1501* ^ref-45789 --- Trying to work out karma with self-discipline was like trying to pick up soap with wet fingers; the harder you grasp, the faster the soap slips away. — *location: 1522* ^ref-40922 --- For example, let us take the case of any person acutely aware of his shortcomings, his fears, desires, and passions, his lack of insight, and of any sense of union or harmony with the life of the universe—in fact, just such a man as Shinran. Then someone tells him that, if only he will open his eyes and see it, he is a Buddha (is saved by Amida) just as he is, and that any attempt to make himself into a Buddha by his own ingenuity is rank spiritual pride. By adopting jiriki he is ignoring what is offered to him from the very beginning by the laws of the universe, and is trying to manufacture it for himself, so that he can take the credit for having earned it. When we say that a man is a Buddha just as he is, what does this mean in terms of psychology? It means that he is divine or fundamentally acceptable just as he is, whether saint or sinner, sage or fool. — *location: 1566* ^ref-63717 --- man is given the sense of freedom to be what he is at this and any moment, free to be both the highest and the lowest that is in him. This results at once in a great relaxation of psychic tension. All self-powered striving and contriving (hakarai) is set aside in the realization that Buddhahood can neither be attained nor got rid of because it alone is. For, in Mahayana nondualism, the Buddha principle, Tathata (Suchness), has no opposite and is the only Reality. — *location: 1573* ^ref-22635 --- In practical terms this experience is one of exhilarating spiritual freedom, amounting almost to the sanctification of ordinary, everyday life. For, when man feels free to be all of himself, there is a magic in every littlest act and thought. — *location: 1579* ^ref-49639 --- Thus it is often remarked in Zen literature that one’s “ordinary thoughts” or “everyday mind” is Enlightenment (satori). I quote a peculiarly suggestive passage from the Rinzai-roku: You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self . . . You yourself as you are—that is Buddha Dharma. I stand or I sit; I array myself or I eat; I sleep when I am fatigued. The ignoramus will deride me but the wise man will understand.9 — *location: 1595* ^ref-42143 --- This kind of writing is very easily misunderstood, for one would naturally ask, “If ordinary life is Nirvana and ordinary thoughts are Enlightenment, whatever is Buddhism about, and what can it possibly teach us, other than to go on living exactly as we have lived before?” — *location: 1606* ^ref-20226 --- Zen wants us to feel nonduality, not just to think it, and therefore when we say, “Nirvana is Samsara,” we are joining two things together that were never in need of being joined. — *location: 1620* ^ref-62550 --- Spiritual freedom, however, involves much more than going on living exactly as you have lived before. It involves a particular kind of joyousness, or what the Buddhists term bliss (ananda). It is the discovery that to accord with the universe, to express the Tao, one has but to live, and when this is fully understood it becomes possible to live one’s life with a peculiar zest and abandon. There are no longer any obstacles to thinking and feeling; you may let your mind go in whatever direction it pleases, for all possible directions are acceptable, and you can feel free to abandon yourself to any of them. Nowhere is there any possibility of escape from the principle of nonduality, for “you yourself as you are—that is Buddha Dharma.” In this state there can be no spiritual pride, for union or identity with the Buddha principle is not something achieved by man; it is achieved for him from the beginning of time, just as the sun has been set on high to give him light and life. — *location: 1629* ^ref-63478 >In othe words, you could go on being anxious, striving and so suffering but why would you? --- Shinran speaks very strongly against those who make use of Amida’s vow and then go on behaving as immorally as ever. He likens them to those who, because they have found an antidote to a poison, just go on taking it. But this is rather a negative way of looking at the problem. From the positive standpoint, Shin would say that Amida’s compassion for us and all other beings, when realized, calls out a corresponding compassion in ourselves. — *location: 1670* ^ref-10460 --- He always thinks of the second and third pieces of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, and ends up with a thoroughly disordered digestion. This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes. — *location: 1744* ^ref-48638 --- The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. This is like trying to make the eyes see themselves. — *location: 1749* ^ref-60317 --- A pupil asked his teacher, “What is the Tao?” He answered, “Everyday life is the Tao.” “How,” went on the pupil, “does one get into accord with it?” “If you try to accord with it,” said the teacher, “you will get away from it.” — *location: 1786* ^ref-1012 --- Apart from life, the self is as meaningless as a solitary note taken from a symphony, as dead as a finger cut from the hand, and as stagnant as air caught from the wind and shut tight in a room. The same may also be said of any person, idea, object, or quality which the self tries to grasp and keep for its own exclusive property. — *location: 1856* ^ref-878 --- It is not a question of merely tolerating the pause for the sake of the note, unless we may also say that it is tolerating the note for the sake of the pause. — *location: 1881* ^ref-64796 --- For what is mere substance, mere energy, mere whole, mere part, mere world, mere self? Each taken by itself is no more than an instrument, a tool, a lifeless quantity which the Tao brings together and shapes after its own meaning; indeed, without that meaning they could not exist at all. As to meaning itself, it cannot be described; it can only be experienced, and only experienced when there is such love between oneself and the world that what each makes together is more than either, just as to husband and wife the child is more than themselves. — *location: 1890* ^ref-23973 ---