Osho Zen Quotes

1. In Zen monasteries, the master moves around with a staff, and whenever he sees some disciple dozing, thinking, and with dreams floating on the face, he will immediately hit him hard on the head. It goes like a shock through the spine, and in a split second, thinking stops, and suddenly awareness arises.
2. When a Zen master makes a pot, a teapot or a cup, he pours his meditation into it, he pours his nothingness into it; he has nothing else. He pours his joy, his silence, his prayer into it. Then it has a different quality, it has a different vibe.
3. There are Zen gardens where rocks are used with flowers, arranged in such a way that the rock enhances the beauty of the flower, the flower enhances the beauty of the rock. They are in an attunement, they are no more enemies.
4. It happens to almost all people — unless they come to know that there is a possibility of a totally different kind of creativity. That creativity is not of the mind. It is of no-mind. In the West, mind still remains the source of all creativity. In the East, we have worked totally differently. That’s why you will always see a difference in a zen painting, or a zen poem. It is a totally different world, because the person who was making it was not motivated by any idea. It simply came — out of the blue. He was not more than a vehicle, a passage.
5. Meditation begins in the turmoil of the mind, reaches to a certain maturity in the hear world of feeling, and reaches to its ultimate flowering in the world of being. And these are the three things to remember first, the prose of the mind, second, the poetry of the heart, and third, just the silent music, the soundless sound, what Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping.
6. In a few Zen monasteries the monk has to start his morning with loud laughter… for no reason at all, just like prayer. You also follow that, and soon you will start enjoying it. Then you will not seek any reason; there is no reason. Why try to find any reason? When one can laugh without reason, who cares?
7. Truth has to be your own, only then is it true. Truth has to be a growth of your own consciousness, only then does it liberate. Knowledge binds; wisdom liberates. Information fills your head with noise; wisdom empties your head utterly, and a great silence is left behind. That silence has a music of its own, a melody of its own. The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. There is utter silence, but still the silence is not dead. It is very alive, throbbing, pregnant, breathing, flowering. All those flowers are invisible; only you will know it, or those who have attained to that state will be able to know it.
8. Zen people tried to go into meditation through many many arts — calligraphy, painting, sculpture, gardening, flower arrangements, archery even. Zen has done something immensely creative. No other religion has been able to rise to such heights of creativity; all other religions have remained poor in that way. And the height consists of only one thing: Zen people became aware that nado can be achieved through as many ways as possible. It is not a question of what you do; it is a question of reading between the lines in whatsoever you are doing.
9. In Zen they have a saying: From the very beginning all are saved, all are Buddhas. But deep deep sleep has fallen over us. The function of the Master is not to save you but just to remind you.
10. In Zen they say: Before you meditate rivers are rivers, mountains are mountains; when you meditate rivers are no more rivers, mountains are no more mountains; and when the meditation is completed, when you have attained it, rivers are again rivers, mountains are again mountains.
11. If one goes on sitting — that’s what Zen people do: year in, year out, they simply go on sitting, doing nothing — slowly, slowly the mind settles, the thoughts disappear. One day, maybe after ten years, twenty years, thirty years — one never knows — one day suddenly the mind is not found at all; it has gone. You are left alone, without the mind. That constant chattering, that mad state, is no more found; you look in and all is silent. And when the mind is not there, you are not there either, because you are nothing but your mind. The disappearance of the mind is the disappearance of your ego, your identity.
12. Zen follows the principle of anima: sitting silently, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. Zen does not believe in exploring; there is no need to go. Buddhism basically is rooted in the feminine principle, hence Buddha looks so feminine, so graceful, so round.
13. Zen masters say ‘If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him!’ They are right… absolutely right. It looks sacrilegious, very disrespectful to say that if you meet Buddha on the way, kill him… but it is very true. You will meet the Buddha on the way or Jesus or Mohammed — that is not the point. You will come across anything that you had been conditioned for in your childhood. Great spiritual masters and Tibetan lamas will appear and you will see that something great is happening. And you will find foolish people appreciating you. They will say ‘Yes… Your status is going higher and higher every day, you are reaching higher stations.’ Don’t listen to these people.
14. There are two kinds of energies in every human being. One is moon energy, another is sun energy. Moon energy is passive, sun energy is active. And there are two possible ways to go into meditation. One is through the moon energy; then meditation is just a silent sitting and doing nothing. That’s what Zen people do: sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself. They simply sit and they wait — whenever the spring comes the grass will grow. They don’t make any effort; they are using moon energy.
15. In Zen monasteries, when somebody reaches to meditation, they judge it by putting a mirror close to his nose. If no vapour comes on the mirror, then he is in the state. That means that the breathing is so slow that the mirror is not affected at all.

Osho Quotes on Zen

1. Zen does not want anybody to be a believer. Either experience or just go home. Except experience, no belief is going to help. So those who have followed Zen masters were not followers, they were fellow travelers. They were rejoicing in the master’s enlightenment. They were drinking as much of his wisdom as possible, and they were finding the path so that they could also experience the same lightning experience which dissolves all questions, all answers, and leaves you simply innocent, centered — eternity in your hands. But they were not followers, and this is very difficult for the ordinary masses to understand.
2. Zen is a religion of beauty. You know the Upanishadic description of the ultimate reality, satyam, shivam, sundram. Either a man can reach to the ultimate by finding the truth of his being, satyam, or he can reach by finding the divinity of his being, the goodness, or he can reach to the ultimate by finding the eternal beauty of his being. Zen is a religion of beauty. The strange fact is that if you can get one, the other two follow automatically. If you attain to truth, satyam, then shivam and sundram will follow automatically. They are one thing looked at from three standpoints. Because beauty is the heartbeat of Zen it has been more creative. It has created great poetry, great paintings. It has transformed ordinary things like archery or swordsmanship into meditation. It is not a non-creative religion; it has created and added to the beauty of existence.
3. In comparison to Zen, all the religions look like entertainment. Formal rituals, social conditionings — Zen goes through them like a sword cutting all the ropes that bind you. It has no ritual, it has no mantra, it has no way of sacrificing anything to anyone. The very basis of sacrifice, God himself, is missing in Zen.
4. Zen is pure essence, unpolluted, uncorrupted by any non-essential. You cannot take away anything from Zen, because it is only a declaration of your self-nature; neither can you add anything to Zen, because anything added will be artificial. Zen is absolutely in favor of nature. It is not against entertainment; in fact only Zen is capable of laughing, of entertainment, but its entertainment is not different from its enlightenment. The very quality of entertainment differs.
5. Zen does not talk about great principles, that has to be noted. It simply creates the device and leaves you to find the way out. Obviously it has been immensely successful.
6. Zen has only created devices, leaving you completely free to find the truth. And it is strange, more people have become enlightened through Zen than through any other religion of the world. The other religions are very big, and Zen is a very small stream. You can see these small things, and a master uses them in such a way that they start pointing to the moon.
7. In the world of Zen, mind is the only thing that has to be thrown out, and then you have the whole universe available. You are welcomed by the whole universe.
8. In Zen, when the master hits you, it means he is showing his love, he is showing his acceptance. By hitting you he is giving you an indication of his approval. That is a kind of certificate. Disciples long for years to be hit by the master. It is a very different world that Zen has created.
9. Zen has a very flexible methodology. It does not give commandments to be followed for generations; it does not give general principles which are applicable in every situation to every person. It is more intimate and more personal.
10. Zen never became the religion of the majority and it will never become. It will remain always for the chosen few, for the rare ones, just because it does not console you by giving any opium, and it does not give you promises and hopes for the future life. It insists on remaining in the present. Don’t move backwards or forwards, because the present moment is the only moment you ever have been in and will ever be in. Whenever it is, it is the present moment.
11. Zen wants you to approach life unconditionally. That means without any prejudice, without any precondition, without any expectation. You can be total only if you are standing at your very center.

Osho Zen Quotes

1. Zen is a non-political religiousness. You cannot call it even religion. It is so individualistic and so emphatically concerned only with the potential of the individual. It does not want anything from the individual, it simply wants him to be himself.
2. Zen gives you a totally different climate. Sometimes masters have even sent their followers to other masters who are against them. It is a very strange phenomenon to the modern eyes, sending someone to your own opponent. But we have to look deep down: if the person can grow more easily in the climate that the opponent master has created, then there is no hesitation in sending him to the other master.
3. Zen has no idea of judgment. It never judges that somebody is a sinner or somebody is a saint. These are only waves; there is no need to waste your time on waves. If you know the ocean, you will not bother about the waves. One wave turns in one way, the other in another way, but they all belong to the same ocean and they all dissolve finally into the same ocean.
4. In Zen everything is, as it is, a manifestation of the cosmic soul. It has to be loved and respected. It does not matter what the manifestation is doing. What matters is that the man who is a thief or a murderer is also coming from the same source as you are, and he will be going to the same source as you are.
5. Zen is for the simple, for the ordinary, for the natural. But the mind of man is for just the opposite; it wants to be extraordinary, it wants to be special, it wants to be known. Respectability, reputation, honor, riches — they are all desires for making you special.
6. Zen wants everybody to be a glory unto himself. It is not an achievement, it is not competition; it is simply originality. And the originality is already there, you have just to throw away all the rubbish that you have been collecting from others. However valuable it may be, it is destroying your original being, covering it with dust; and you will never be happy unless you find your original being. The very finding of your original being is such a dance, such a joy, that you can bless the whole world yet you will remain overflowing.
7. Zen wants you to drop all knowledge so that you can become utterly pure and innocent, so that you can say with tremendous beauty, “I don’t know.”
8. Zen cuts all this rubbish like a sharp sword in one single blow. It has nothing to do with anything that takes you away from you; it may be God, it may be hell, it may be heaven — all kinds of rewards and all kinds of fears about punishment. All the religions are living on the exploitation of your senses because they open outwards.
9. Jesus says, “Seek, and seek until you find.” Go on making the effort, bring the effort to a climax, to a crescendo, then Zen becomes applicable. If you study Zen in the beginning you can move in a wrong direction. And that is happening in the West, because people in the West who have written about Zen don’t know what effort Zen people have been making before they relax. And it appeals to the lazy mind very much. That’s why there is so much attraction for Zen in the West: don’t do anything — it appeals, because nothing is needed, you are already the case. It appeals, but it is not going to help.
10. Much has to be done before you can come to a point where relaxation is possible. And that relaxation is not from you, it happens: because the whole energy has moved, nothing remains behind to be restless; a rest comes. And Zen is right, because only in that rest is the ultimate revealed. And Jesus is right, because that rest comes only when you have put all your energies into effort. Jesus is the first part and Zen is the last part of the same process; Zen is the conclusion, Jesus is the beginning.
11. Zen masters have used terms and words that no religion can use. But because of that I say that no religion is so religious as Zen, because if you REALLY love, where is the fear? You can joke, you can laugh, and an enlightened man like Buddha will laugh with you — there is no problem. He will not feel hurt. If he feels hurt, he is not enlightened at all. And he will not say: Don’t use such profane language — because for Buddha all language is profane, only silence is sacred. So whether you call him a stupid fellow or one who has awakened, both are the same for him. Language as such is profane. Only silence is holy. Whatsoever you say is the same.

Osho Zen Quotes

1. For DHYAN, Zen, there exists no equivalent in the English language, because meditation itself means thinking — to meditate upon. Some object is there. Remember, dhyan is the original word. Dhyan traveled to China with Bodhidharma and in the Chinese language it became CH’AN. And then from China it traveled to Japan and in Japanese it became first ZAN, and then ZEN; but the original root is dhyan — Ch’an, Zan, Zen. In English there is no word equivalent to it. Meditation also means thinking, a consistent thinking. Contemplation means thinking too. It may be thinking about God, but it is thinking, and dhyan or Zen is a no-thinking state. It is action, without thought. Thought needs time.
2. You cannot deceive a Zen master. He is not concerned with what you are doing, he is concerned with what you are in that moment of doing. That is a totally different thing.
3. All Zen masters are depicted in a ridiculous way. Disciples enjoy it. But those portraits carry a quality that Bodhidharma is dangerous, that if you go to him he will kill you, that you cannot escape him, that he will follow you and haunt you, that wherever you go he will be there, that unless he kills you he cannot leave you. That is the thing depicted with all Zen masters, even Buddha.
4. Life is a mystery, and there is nothing to explain — because everything is just open, it is just in front of you. Encounter it! Meet it! Be courageous! That is the whole standpoint of Zen.
5. Zen is an effort to become alert and awake. All religion is nothing but that: an effort to become more conscious, an effort to become more aware, an effort to bring more alertness, more attentiveness to your life.
6. Zen believes that truth cannot be expressed by words, but it can be expressed by gestures, action. Something can be done about it. You cannot say it, but you can show it.
7. ZEN IS JUST ZEN. There is nothing comparable to it. It is unique — unique in the sense that it is the most ordinary and yet the most extraordinary phenomenon that has happened to human consciousness. It is the most ordinary because it does not believe in knowledge, it does not believe in mind. It is not a philosophy, not a religion either. It is the acceptance of the ordinary existence with a total heart, with one’s total being, not desiring some other world, supra-mundane, supra-mental. It has no interest in any esoteric nonsense, no interest in metaphysics at all. It does not hanker for the other shore; this shore is more than enough. Its acceptance of this shore is so tremendous that through that very acceptance it transforms this shore — and this very shore becomes the other shore.
8. The great miracle of Zen is in the transformation of the mundane into the sacred. And it is tremendously extraordinary because this way life has never been approached before, this way life has never been respected before.
9. When I look all around, Zen seems to be the only possibility, because in Zen, Buddha and Lao Tzu have become one. The meeting has already happened. The seed is there, the seed of that great bridge which can make East and West one. Zen is going to be the meeting-point. It has a great future — a great past and a great future. And the miracle is that Zen is neither interested in the past nor in the future. Its total interest is in the present. Maybe that’s why the miracle is possible, because the past and the future are bridged by the present.
10. Zen lives in the present. The whole teaching is: how to be in the present, how to get out of the past which is no more and how not to get involved in the future which is not yet, and just to be rooted, centered, in that which is. The whole approach of Zen is of immediacy, but because of that it can bridge the past and the future. It can bridge many things: it can bridge the past and the future, it can bridge the East and the West, it can bridge body and soul. It can bridge the unbridgeable worlds: this world and that, the mundane and the sacred.
11. Zen cures you of your abnormality. It makes you again normal, it makes you again ordinary. It does not make you a saint, remember. It does not make you a holy person, remember. It simply makes you an ordinary person — takes you back to your nature, back to your source.
12. Try to understand Zen through laughter, not through prayer. Try to understand Zen through flowers, butterflies, sun, moon, children, people in all their absurdities. Watch this whole panorama of life, all these colors, the whole spectrum. Zen is not a doctrine, it is not a dogma. It is growing into an insight. It is a vision — very light-hearted, not serious at all. Be light-hearted, light-footed. Be of light step. Don’t carry religion like a burden. And don’t expect religion to be a teaching; it is not. It is certainly a discipline, but not a teaching at all. Teaching has to be imposed upon you from the outside and teaching can only reach to your mind, never to your heart, and never, never to the very center of your being. Teaching remains intellectual. It is an answer to human curiosity, and curiosity is not a true search.
13. Zen gives you a discipline to become a mirror so that you can reflect that which is. All that is needed is a thoughtless awareness.
14. Zen is interested in discipline, not in teaching. It wants you to be more alert so you can see more clearly. It does not give you the answer; it gives you the eyes to see. What is the use of telling a blind man what light is and all the theories about light? It is futile. You are simply being stupid by answering the curiosity of a blind man. What is urgently needed is treatment of his eyes. He needs an operation, he needs new eyes, he needs medicine. That is discipline.
15. Zen, in the first place, is not a teaching but a device to awaken you. It is not information, it is not knowledge. It is a method to shake you up, to wake you up. Teaching means you are fast asleep and somebody goes on talking about what awakening is — and you go on snoring and he goes on talking. YOU are asleep, HE is asleep; otherwise he will not talk to you. At least when he sees that you are snoring he will not talk to you.