The Way of Zen
Taoism is a way of liberation, which never comes by means of revolution, since it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it.
Alan Watts • The Way of Zen
THIS
Thus nirvana is the equivalent of moksha, release or liberation. Seen from one side, it appears to be despair–the recognition that life utterly defeats our efforts to control it, that all human striving is no more than a vanishing hand clutching at clouds. Seen from the other side, this despair bursts into joy and creative power, on the principle t
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To attain nirvana is also to attain Buddhahood, awakening. But this is not attainment in any ordinary sense, because no acquisition and no motivation are involved. It is impossible to desire nirvana, or to intend to reach it, for anything desirable or conceivable as an object of action is, by definition, not nirvana. Nirvana can only arise unintent
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what appears to us to be samsara is really nirvana, and that what appears to be the world of form (rupa) is really the void (sunya). Hence the famous saying: Form is not different from emptiness; emptiness is not different from form. Form is precisely emptiness; emptiness is precisely form.6
Alan Watts • The Way of Zen
1 Samyag-drishti, or complete view. 2 Samyak-samkalpa, or complete understanding. 3 Samyag-vak, or complete (i.e., truthful) speech. 4 Samyak-karmanta, or complete action. 5 Samyagajiva, or complete vocation. 6 Samyag-vyayama, or complete application. 7 Samyak-smriti, or complete recollectedness. 8 Samyak-samadhi, or complete contemplation.
Alan Watts • The Way of Zen
It should be noted, further, that we call our bodies complex as a result of trying to understand them in terms of linear thought, of words and concepts. But the complexity is not so much in our bodies as in the task of trying to understand them by this means of thinking. It is like trying to make out the features of a large room with no other light
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The active principle of the Round is known as karma or “conditioned action,” action, that is, arising from a motive and seeking a result–the type of action which always requires the necessity for further action. Man is involved in karma when he interferes with the world in such a way that he is compelled to go on interfering, when the solution of a
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In English the differences between things and actions are clearly, if not always logically, distinguished, but a great number of Chinese words do duty for both nouns and verbs–so that one who thinks in Chinese has little difficulty in seeing that objects are also events, that our world is a collection of processes rather than entities.
Alan Watts • The Way of Zen
However religiously “emancipated,” the technological mind shows that it has inherited the same division against itself when it tries to subject the whole human order to the control of conscious reason. It forgets that reason cannot be trusted if the brain cannot be trusted, since the power of reason depends upon organs that were grown by “unconscio
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Every positive statement about ultimate things must be made in the suggestive form of myth, of poetry.