Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.

Zen is the vehicle of reality.

Zen Buddhism is a discipline where belief isn't necessary.

Most assuredly Zen is a religion, but it is a religion without scripture, without doctrine or dogma and without sin.

Without the mind there is no Buddha. Without the Buddha there's no mind.

Of course the Dharma-body of the Buddha was the hedge at the bottom of the garden. At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I - or rather the blessed Not-I - cared to look at.

The aim of Zen training is to attain the state of consciousness which occurs when the individual ego is emptied of itself and becomes identified with the infinite reality of all things.

One has to go beyond the mind to experience the spiritual bliss of desirelessness.

From the Buddhist point of view, it is true that emptiness is a characteristic of all of life - if we look carefully at any experience we will find transparency, insubstantiality, with no solid, unchanging core to our experience. But that does not mean that nothing matters.

Your nature is the Buddha.

Inspiration comes from everything from the entire world, and it's hard to pinpoint one thing. I can trace one inspiration to the writing of 13th-century Zen master Dogen Zenji, who writes beautifully about time.

To see nothing is to perceive the Way, and to understand nothing is to know the Dharma, because seeing is neither seeing nor not seeing and because understanding is neither understanding nor not understanding.

To a Buddhist, contradictions only exist in a mind that has been forced to cultivate them.

And as I stumbled onto Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, it was the first time I had ever read any sort of philosophy that really made a tremendous amount of sense. What I liked that was missing from my experience of Christianity growing up was a sort of acceptance, a sort of being OK with being imperfect and not focusing on the sin.

My feeling or philosophy is closer to Taoism and Zen Buddhism, 'cause it's the most practical.

I have a profound affection for Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism's particular ways of meditating.

All of us, at different times of life, are looking for answers. It happened to me a decade ago and led me to the path of wanting to know more. I read Osho, Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and Parmananda Yogi. I haven't found the ultimate answer. The journey is the answer.

Philosophically, I would say that I am Buddhist.

The Great Way has no gate. Clear water has no taste. The tongue has no bone. In complete stillness, a stone girl is dancing.

Zen is the only religion in the world that teaches sudden enlightenment. It says that enlightenment takes no time, it can happen in a single, split second.

What you believe you experience.

Buhhdism is wisdom. As long as we have wisdom, we can put all things to the best use, we can turn everything in the direction of happiness.

Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.

Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice; there is no other way of life than this way of life.

If you have not linked yourself to true emptiness, you will never understand the art of peace.