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QUOTES BY KENNETH BEITTEL
on zen
"It is true, nevertheless, that advanced lessons assume relative mastery of beginning ones, and so, just like stages of initiation, the lessons are hierarchical, even though the same mysteries of practice, form, and art, if rightly understood, shine through all levels."
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"A potter's labor is consumed WITHIN the work... the craft within the art."
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"Young potters are like determined oaks; old ones like flowing willows... "
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"We imitate our masters only because we are not yet masters ourselves, and only because in doing so we learn the truth about what cannot be imitated."
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"... the Japanese word hara as bodily roundness... the centering of gravity in the sphere of the belly."
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"Centering is a quieting of motion without loss of vitality."
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"Meditation is thus not removed from tradition as understood in the East. Even as hatha-yoga postures can be acts of meditation, the same is true of shooting an arrow from a bow or wedging and centering clay. In subtle ways, the mind negates the mind, requiring one to be a disciple of a deep tradition - to partake, in other words, of the true meaning of discipline. The true self is not the clamoring, willful ego; it is more like the Zen ideal of being totally absorbed in whatever one does, whether chopping wood or forming clay."
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"... without emptiness, the bowl cannot overflow with contents."
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"To be 'unhampered by senses and intellect' is to dwell openly within the world of the creative imagination. The master of a traditional art represents this state where action and creation spring effortlessly 'out of formlessness and soundlessness.' Paradoxically, this state is reached when unrelenting discipline and practice have purged the rituals of the tradional art from the interference of both senses and intellect, so that the 'isness' of the simplest act, such as preparing one's clay for the wheel, contains all that there is to being in the universe.
"The master, thus draws the apprentice slowly away from preconceived ideas, theories, and even history, toward life as fullness of present action. This profound lesson cannot be communicated orally, in the didactic or philosophical mode. We can know and share much more than we can say. In addition to head knowledge, there is hand knowledge, eye knowledge, and heart knowledge; and heart, eye, and hand fuse through selfless practice and example."
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"There is no transference of secrets from master ot disciple. Teaching is not difficult, listening is not difficult either, but what is truly difficult is to become conscious of what you have in yourself and be able to use it as your own."
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"Zen ki in art, then, is that which merges self and mind completely and forgetfully in the nature of precisely and presently what one is doing. The distance between suject and object completely disappears."
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Last Update: January 13, 2007