New site for Analaytic Zen blog

This copy of the blog will remain intact for now, but I've moved the main Analytic Zen blog over to my Opera account. Please update your bookmarks to point to: http://my.opera.com/AnalyticZen/blog/

Moment of Zen - Bassui Tokushō

“The root of life and death is the conscious mind. Beginning practitioners mistakenly take things like the emission of light and he performance of miracles, which are really the roots of ignorance, for the clear expression of Buddha Nature. This conscious mind is the boss of notorious robbers, the origin of the ten evil deeds, and the pit of knowledge based on attachment to form. If it is not destroyed, though you were to speak wonderful words of the miraculous they would all be no more than strange spirits of wild foxes. In the end you wouldn’t be able to avoid floating in the world of transmigration. That’s why its destruction is connected with the one great matter. The reason for transmigration through the six realms of existence, from the beginningless beginning to the present, tossing and turning in great pain, is that you can’t turn off this conscious mind.”

- Zen Master Bassui (1327-1387)

Moment of Zen - Master Xuyun

When practicing, one needs to have a bold & persevering mind as if your parents have just died.

- Zen Master Xuyun (1839 - 1959)

Moment of Zen - Cormac McArthy

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

- Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

Moment of Zen - Master Sheng-yen

Once you have learned something, be sure to forget it. Chan advocates throwing everything away. I am not really advocating that we return to some vegetative state, where your head is as empty as a dried pumpkin. We must learn, but we don't want to cling to what we have learned. We are most disturbed not by what goes on around us, but what goes on in our heads. What is going on in our heads? It's our thoughts entangled with the past, present, future.

- Chan Master Sheng-yen