Zen is to religion what a Japanese "rock garden" is to a garden. Zen knows no god, no afterlife, no good and no evil, as the rock-...garden knows no flowers, herbs or shrubs. It has no doctrine or holy writ: its teaching is transmitted mainly in the form of parables as ambiguous as the pebbles in the rock-garden which symbolise now a mountain, now a fleeting tiger. When a disciple asks "What is Zen?", the master's traditional answer is "Three pounds of flax" or "A decaying noodle" or "A toilet stick" or a whack on the pupil's head.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Zen ... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the ...potatoes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When the child is twelve, your wife buys her a splendidly silly article of clothing called a training bra. To train what? I never ...had a training jock. And believe me, when I played football, I could have used a training jock more than any twelve-year-old needs a training bra.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American woman's concept of marriage is a clearly etched picture of something uninflated on the floor. A sleeping-bag without ...air, a beanbag without beans, a padded bra without pads. To work on it, you start pumping--what the magazines call "breathing life into your marriage." Do enough of this and the marriage becomes a kind of Banquo's ghost, a quasi-living entity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Green politics at its worst amounts to a sort of Zen fascism; less extreme, it denounces growth and seeks to stop the world so tha...t we can all get off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jum...p, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next--life teems the earth. And when that life is not rushing to escape, it is playing statues to do the same. See the hummingbird, there, not there. As thought arises and blinks off, so this thing of summer vapor; the clearing of a cosmic throat, the fall of a leaf. And where it was--a whisper. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. In between the scurries and flights, what? Be a chameleon, ink- blend, chromosome change with the landscape. Be a pet rock, lie with the dust, rest in the rainwater in the filled barrel by the drainspout outside your grandparents' window long ago.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play... to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good ...for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »