“SKILLFUL MEANS”: GENERAL

The future will depend on what we do in the present.

(II-259, GNV 92)

The great contemplative traditions of East and West, while differing sometimes quite radically in their formulation of their aims and in their understanding of their methods, agree in thinking that by spiritual disciplines a man can radically change his life and attain to a deeper meaning, a more perfect integration, a more complete fulfillment, a more total liberty of spirit than are possible in the routines of a purely active existence centered on money-making. There is more to human life than just “getting somewhere” in war, politics, business.

(MZM viii)

Chuang Tzu himself would be the first to say that you cannot tell people to do whatever they want when they don’t even know what they want in the first place!

(WCZ 16)

Once a man has sent his foot on this way, there is no excuse for abandoning it, for to be actually on the way is to recognize without doubt or hesitation that only the way is fully real and that everything else is deception, except in so far as it may in some secret and hidden manner be connected with “the way.”

(IEW 67)

Christianity is first of all a way of life, rather than a way of thought.

(IEW 77)

I think the dialogue between Christianity and Buddhism will be most fruitful on the plane not of abstract metaphysical systems but on the plane of what I would call metaphysical experience — that is to say, the basic intuition of being the direct grasp of the ground of reality, which is essential to a true and lived metaphysics. I repeat that I am not concerned with purely abstract metaphysical systems. The basic metaphysical intuition is close to the kind of religious intuition which opens out into mysticism. On this level I think we come very close to what Buddhism is saying. On this level Zen seems to me something very close to home, very alive, very helpful, indeed necessary. In Christian metaphysical-and-mystical experience there is something very close to Zen.

(WF 332)

Even where there are irreconcilable differences in doctrine and in formulated belief, there may still be great similarities and analogies in the realm of religious experience.

(AJ 312)

The method should suit one’s character. After correct practice one feels “cool, bright, and calm.”

(AJ 15)

Both Buddhism and Christianity are alike in making use of ordinary everyday human existence as material for a radical transformation of consciousness.

(ZBA 51)

At the end of Zen training, when one has become “absolutely naked,” one finds himself to be the ordinary “Tom, Dick or Harry” that he has been all along.

(ZBA 118)

Zen saying: before I grasped Zen, the mountains were nothing but mountains and the rivers nothing but rivers. When I got into Zen, the mountains were no longer mountains and the rivers no longer rivers. But when I understood Zen, the mountains were only mountains and the rivers only rivers.

(ZBA 140)

Where the fountains of passion

Lie deep

The heavenly springs

Are soon dry.

(WCZ 60)

The true tranquility sought by the “man of Tao” is Ying ning, tranquility in the action of non-action . . . a tranquility which transcends the division between activity and contemplation by entering into union with the nameless and invisible Tao.

(WCZ 26)

The Bhagavad-Gita can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life.” But it is essentially something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action, and contemplation in a fulfillment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, of being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will.

(AJ 348)

“To know when to stop

To know when you can get no further

By your own action,

This is the right beginning!”

(xxiii.3–7, WCZ 133)

For each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being: the incomparable point, not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it. If you stop seeking, it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost, for you are, at last, nowhere.

(CP 452)