Walking in Zen, sitting in Zen
Here are some of the beautiful quotes from the book. Read, meditate and enjoy.
A MAN OF ZEN WALKS IN ZEN AND SITS IN ZEN
Whenever the word “meditation” is used, immediately the question arises, “On what?” That question is irrelevant. If you are asking, “On what?” then you are asking what to think about, contemplate about, concentrate on – and that is not meditation.
Zen wants you to be religious, not in a formal way, but to be really religious in your day-to-day life. Zen does not divide your life into the mundane and the sacred, it says everything is sacred. So eating, be meditative. Walking, be meditative. Whatsoever you are doing… taking a bath, be meditative. Wherever you are, you are in the temple. This whole existence is God’s temple! Behave as you would like to behave in a temple. God is present everywhere.
Zen is not a philosophy, it is not a doctrine. It is an experience, an experience of your own interiority, of your own subjectivity – not an objective experience.
The first condition is: forget all that you have learned. The second condition is: be calm, quiet, contented.
The man of Zen contains all contradictions. He is vast enough, he can contain contradictions. He enjoys paradoxes. He does not make life a problem. He looks at life as a mystery. He is not interested in solving it, he is interested only in living it – living it to the uttermost.
Real negation means helping people to get rid of all kinds of beliefs and disbeliefs, helping them to get rid of all the conditionings that the society enforces upon you.
That’s what Zen is: it negates. It says there is no God, it says there is no soul, it says there is no paradise, it says there is nothing. It leaves you nothing to believe in. Even if you start believing in nothing, the Zen Master is going to hit you hard.
Passion is ugly, compassion is beautiful. Passion is a curse, compassion is a blessing.
I am simply saying: Be aware; or, awareness is right and unawareness is wrong. When you are aware, things will start changing of their own accord, and then the mind functions as a servant. It is a machine, a beautiful machine, one of the most complex machines invented by nature in thousands of years. Man has not yet been able to create anything comparable to it. Even the best computer is not yet so capable. A single human mind can contain all the libraries of the world. It is almost infinite. Its capacity is great, its use is great, but it should be your servant not your master. As a servant it is beautiful; as a master it is dangerous.
Buddha says, “Be a light unto yourself.” That is his greatest message. Nobody else in the whole world, in the whole history of humanity, has been so respectful towards others as Gautam the Buddha. “Be a light unto yourself.”
So don’t cling to anything because everything is impermanent. And don’t desire anything because even if you get it, you will lose it. If you don’t get it, you will be frustrated. If you get it and lose it, you will be frustrated. Either way you will be in misery, you are inviting misery. So don’t desire anything and don’t cling to anything.
It is to live in your suchness; it is hidden in your suchness. Whatsoever you are, live in it. Don’t create any conflict, don’t live through the ideal. Don’t be an idealist, just be natural. But everybody is being taught to be an idealist: “Become a Jesus” or “Become a Buddha” or “Become a Krishna.” Nobody tells you just to be yourself! Why should you be a Jesus? One Jesus is enough and one Jesus is beautiful - he enriches the existence. Many Jesuses just carrying crosses, and wherever you go you meet them… It won’t look beautiful, it won’t add to the beauty of existence; it will make the whole world ugly. Wherever you go you meet a Mahavira standing naked…. It is because of this that God never creates the same person again. He never repeats; he is original. He always creates a new person. You have never been before, and there is no one who is like you, and there will never be anybody else like you again. In the whole of eternity you alone are just like you. Look at the beauty of it and the glory of it and the respect that God has shown to you! What more respectability do you need? See the uniqueness of yourself. There is no need to be unique; you are already unique, just as everybody else is unique. You are unique in your ordinariness, in your suchness.
That is possible only by practicing zazen… Satori is possible only by practicing zazen. Zazen means: JUST SITTING, DOING NOTHING, THE SPRING COMES AND THE GRASS GROWS BY ITSELF.
Greed is nothing but fear of death. Greed is out of fear; it is the fearful person who becomes greedy.
It is the same world, the same people…. A Buddha walks, a Jesus walks in the same world – the same trees, the same rocks, the same people, the same sky – but they live in paradise and you live in hell. The difference is created by the mind.
Zen teaches choiceless awareness: neither this nor that, neti neti. It teaches you absolute negation. And that is the meaning of zazen: doing nothing, neither singing a film song nor saying a prayer, just sitting silently, doing nothing. The moment you do something the mind becomes powerful, because the mind is the doer. And the moment you are a doer, the ego comes back. The ego is a doer. When you are in a state of non-doing, the mind has to cease, the ego has to disappear.
Respect freedom more than anything else because freedom is the highest value – even higher than love. If your love brings freedom, it is good. If your love does not bring freedom, it is not good – it is not even love either.
Religion is not a desire for God, it is an experience of godliness. And the question is not how to find God, the question is how to drop desiring. This has to be remembered, very emphatically remembered: if you start seeking and searching for God you will remain the same person, you will never change. If you start trying to understand the nature of desire you are bound to go through a radical revolution because anybody who is a little bit intelligent is bound to see the utter futility of desire – it leads nowhere. And the moment desire disappears from your being you have arrived.
SOME MEN POUR SCORN ON ZEN OR HOLD IT IN QUESTION. THEY PLAY WITH FIRE, TRYING IN VAIN TO BURN THE SKY. A TRUE STUDENT OF ZEN SHOULD HEAR WHAT THEY SAY AS IF THEIR WORDS WERE SWEET DROPS OF DEW, FORGETTING EVEN THEIR SWEETNESS HOWEVER WHEN HE ENTERS INTO THE REALM OF THE NON-MENTAL. I CONSIDER HURTFUL WORDS AS VIRTUOUS ACTIONS AND I TREAT THOSE WHO HURT ME AS GOOD MASTERS, FOR I FEEL NEITHER FOR NOR AGAINST THE MAN WHO INSULTS ME. I DO NOT NEED TO EXPLAIN THE TWO POWERS OF PERSEVERANCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF WITHOUT-BIRTH AND WITHOUT-DEATH, SUCHNESS, NIRVANA.
Real philosophy starts in a state of not-knowing. And that is the beauty of doubt: it destroys all beliefs.
My concern is certainly with consciousness, not with character. My concern is to make you more aware, alert, and out of that alertness whatsoever happens is good. If out of that alertness service happens it is good, if love happens it is good, if compassion happens it is good, if sharing happens it is good, because out of that awareness evil is impossible.
Meditate over Murphy’s maxim: If you don’t care where you are you ain’t lost.
Life is more than meaning, far more. Machines have meaning, flowers don’t have meaning; meaning means utility.
Life is not a problem and it cannot be reduced to questions and there is no answer for it. It is a mystery, unanswerable, insoluble. You have to live it, you have to taste it, you have to experience it. And it is experienced in silence.
One should live totally and one should die totally.
MAN WHILE HE IS UNCONSCIOUS lives only in coincidences; his life consists of only coincidences and nothing else. The unconscious life is an accidental life.
Watch anything, just remember that you are a watcher. Don’t become judgmental, don’t be a judge.
Live for God, because God is life. And, of course God is also death, but death is beautiful only when it comes out of a fulfilled life, when it is an ultimate flowering of life. When death is a sacrifice it is ugly.
Buddhas go on saying, “Wake up!” and they won’t listen. But just let Sophia Loren enter and immediately all the saints are alive, awake, fully awake!
THERE IS NO WAY TO SEEK TRUTH because truth is not far away. Truth is not “there” somewhere so that you have to go to it, so that you have to reach to it; truth is not to be sought because truth is the very being of the seeker. How can you seek the seeker? How can you know the knower? That is impossible. You cannot encounter yourself. You are the TRUTH.
Don’t abandon existence. Don’t abandon the ordinary existence in any effort for some illusory truth, for some illusory longing for God. Leave that for the fools. The intelligent person simply lives moment to moment with no desire to seek anything, with no expectation of finding anything. He simply lives moment to moment, joyously. His life is very ordinary; he has no desire to be extraordinary. He has no desire to be a Buddha, hence he is a Buddha. He has no desire to be extraordinary, hence he is extraordinary. Because every ordinary person has the desire to be extraordinary; only extraordinary people don’t have that desire.
Meditation is a process of getting rid of the whole past, of getting rid of all diseases, of getting rid of all the pus that has gathered in you. It is painful, but it is cleansing, and there is no other way to cleanse you.
In fact marriage is wrong. Once marriage disappears from the world, divorce will disappear of its own accord! I am against divorce – I want divorce to disappear from the world absolutely; but the only way to do it is to destroy marriage completely.
don’t try to understand Zen. Go within yourself to find out who you are, where you are. You will not find anybody there, just pure emptiness. And then vision is clear. No person, no Buddha. All is silent, utterly silent. There is nothing to say. In that silence one becomes truth. Not only that one knows truth, one becomes truth. That is the only way to know it.
I emphasize the fact that Krishna is as much a man as you are; there is nothing special about him. He needs food the way you need it, he needs water the way you need it, he sleeps the way you sleep, he dies the way you die. The only difference is that he has become aware of his infinite potential and you are not aware of your infinite potential. There is no difference in the potential, but you are unaware and he is aware; that’s the only difference.
Lao Tzu says: You cannot defeat me because I don’t want to be victorious at all. Jesus says: Blessed are those who are the last.
Love is enough. So while the love lasts, good, be together; and when the love disappears say good-bye in deep gratitude, but don’t cling to each other. Marriage means clinging.
OSHO, WHAT IS “WALKING IN ZEN, SITTING IN ZEN”?
THERE IS NO NEED TO SAY anything about it. I will walk to my car and sit in the car: That is walking in Zen, sitting in Zen.