Quotes
Dogen, a Zen master
“Dogen, a Zen master of the thirteenth century, said that spring does not become summer and, in the same way, firewood does not become ashes: there is spring, and then there is summer; there is firewood, and then there are ashes. By the same argument, a living being does not become a corpse, and an unenlightened person does not become a Buddha. Monday does not become Tuesday; one o’clock does not become four o’clock. Thus to try to become a Buddha, to attain enlightenment or liberation or supreme unselfishness, is like trying to wash off blood with blood, or polishing a brick to make a mirror. As Chuang-tzu said, ‘You see your egg and expect it to crow.’”
So, according to Vedanta
“So, according to Vedanta, the central doctrine of Hinduism, all bodies are the clothes of the one and only Self in its innumerable disguises, and the whole universe is a masquerade ball pretending to be a tragedy and then realizing that it’s a ball.”
Trying to force a lock
“Trying to force a lock bends the key, for which reason a truly intelligent man never forces an issue. He resorts instead to judo, the ‘gentle way’ of trimming one’s sails to the wind, of rolling with the punch, and of splitting wood along the grain.”
If I am my organism
“If I am my organism, I am also my environment. From the ecological and biophysical standpoints every organism goes with its environment transactionally: the one implies the other as buying implies selling and front implies back and the positive pole implies the negative. Thus every living organism implies, not only the conditions of the immediate solar system, but also the entire constellation of galaxies. If a human body could be transported to another universe, careful study by the local scientists would eventually reveal that it came from an environment which included sun, moon, planets, Milky Way, and the nebula in Andromeda. For as the fruit implies the tree, the human organism implies a cosmic energy system which ‘peoples’ in the same way as a plant flowers.”