If he will but listen intently to everyday sounds,
he will come to realization
and at that instant see the very Source.
Kuo-an Shih-yuan, Comment to the third Oxherding Picture
What is it that hears these sounds?
Bassui Tokusho, Dharma talk
It’s not that ”I” hears the birds sing,
it’s just hearing the birds.
It is the false ”I” that interrupts the wonder with the con-stant desire to think about ”I”. And all the while the wonder is occurring: the birds sing, the cars go by ...
Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen
After experience had taught me the hollowness and futility of everything that is ordinarily encountered in daily life, and I realized that all the things which were the source and object of my anxiety held nothing of good or evil in themselves save insofar as the mind was influenced by them, I resoved at length to inquire whether there existed a true good, one which was capable of communicating itself and could alone affect the mind to the exclusion of all else, whether, in fact, there was something whose discovery and acquisition would afford me a continuous and supreme joy to all eternity.
Baruch de Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect
Werd’ ich zum Augenblicke sagen:
Verweile doch! du bist so schön!
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
and it has time enough.
Rabindranath Tagore
If by eternity is understood not eternal temporal duration,
but timelessness,
then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
A nightingale warbles on a twig,
the sun shines on undulating willows.
Kuo-an Shih-yuan, Verse to the third Oxherding Picture