Philip Kapleau Quotes

“Every individual who eats flesh food, whether an animal is killed expressely for him or not, is supporting the trade of slaughtering and contributing to the violent deaths of harmless animals.”

— Philip Kapleau

You yourself are time- your body, your mind, the objects around you. Plunge into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the course of the currents.

— Philip Kapleau

The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.

— Philip Kapleau

“A Zen master, when asked where he would go after he died, replied, 'To Hell, for that's where help is needed most.'”

— Philip Kapleau

“To put the flesh of an animal into one's belly makes one an accessory after the fact of its slaughter, simply because if cows, pigs, sheep, fowl, and fish, to mention the most common, were not eaten they would not be killed.”

— Philip Kapleau

“Many have come to realization simply by listening to the tinkling of a bell or some other sound”

— Philip Kapleau

“For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of crisscrossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible; his life is thus centered not in reality itself but in his ideas of it. By focusing the mind wholly on each objects and every action, zazen strips it of extraneous thoughts and allows us to enter into a full rapport with life.”

— Philip Kapleau

“To be reborn hourly and daily in this life, we need to die-to give of ourselves wholly to the demands of the moment, so that we utterly "disappear." Thoughts of past, present, or future, of life and death, of this world and the next, are transcended in the superabundance of the now. Time and timelessness coalesce: this is the moment of eternity. Thus our every act is a matter either of giving life or taking it away. If we perform each act with total absorption, we give life to our life. If we do things half-heartedly, we kill that life.”

— Philip Kapleau

The truth is that everything is One, and this of course is not a numerical one.

— Philip Kapleau

“Mindfulness is a state wherein one is totally aware in any situation and so always able to respond appropriately. Yet one is aware of being aware. Mindlessness, on the other hand, or "no-mindness" as it has been called, is a condition of such complete absorption that there is not vestige of self-awareness.”

— Philip Kapleau

To suppress the grief, the pain, is to condemn oneself to a living death. Living fully means feeling fully; it means becoming completely one with what you are experiencing and not holding it at arm's length.

— Philip Kapleau

“If you fall into poverty, live that way without grumbling - then your poverty will not burden you. Likewise, if you are rich, live with your riches. All this is the functioning of Buddha-nature. In short, Buddha-nature has the quality of infinite adaptability.”

— Philip Kapleau

“Zen Master Dogen has pointed out that anxiety, when accepted, is the driving force to enlightenment in that it lays bare the human dilemma at the same time that it ignites our desire to break out of it.”

— Philip Kapleau

“Although we all possess the seeds of great love and compassion, without the light of the enlightened one's wisdom and the waters of their compassion these seeds would never spout.”

— Philip Kapleau

“Die while alive and be thoroughly dead. Then do what you will, and all will be well”

— Philip Kapleau

“Ultimately the case for shunning animal flesh does not rest on what the Buddha allegedly said or didn't say. What is does rest on is our innate moral goodness, compassion, and pity which, when liberated, lead us to value all forms of life. It is obvious, then, that willfully to take life, or through the eating of meat indirectly to cause others to kill, runs counter to the deepest instincts of human beings.”

— Philip Kapleau

“Anyone familiar with the numerous accounts of the Buddha's extraordinary compassion and reverence for living beings - for example his insistence that his monks strain the water they drink lest they inadvertently cause the death of any micro-organisms - could never believe that he would be indifferent to the sufferings of domestic animals caused by their slaughter of food”

— Philip Kapleau