This page lists some of the all-time best Henry Shukman quotes. Enjoy!
Page Contents:
- Zen & Koans Quotes
- Inquiry & Awakening Quotes
- Peace & Happiness Quotes
- Separate & Inseparable Quotes
- Everything & Nothing Quotes
50+ Henry Shukman Quotes on Zen, Koans, Awakening, & More
Henry Shukman Quotes on Zen & Koans
“What ‘Zen’ really means is a deep path of existential training—a way of coming to experience life in a different way that’s so much richer and so much wider, where in any moment you can come back to here and now … The deeper side of it is the study of who am I? What is this experience I’m having right now?” — Henry Shukman
“In a certain way, Zen is absolutely not a religion. It’s about changing our hearts and minds.” — Henry Shukman
“The key thing being transmitted is not cultural trappings, instead it’s looking into the core of a human being and seeing what we really are.” — Henry Shukman
“The Zen form of Buddhism is a meditation form of Buddhism meaning that it’s not so interested in scripture, it’s not so interested in doctrinal study, it’s not so interested in ritual, it’s not so interested in what we might regard as forms of worship. It’s interested in the practice of meditation.” — Henry Shukman
“We need to understand what ‘Buddha’ means. It just means awakened—human being discovering something innate about a human being, and the human being’s relationship with all other things discovered through practice.” — Henry Shukman
“We hope to be consciously practicing all the time. We realize that it’s not just on the cushion. We could call it a cultivating of a state of deeper awareness and to be able to bring that into all activities … There’s even more to realize, and there’s also the great project of really living what we realize, moment by moment, all the time.” — Henry Shukman
“Practice is just here to help us be the beings that we are.” — Henry Shukman
“Zen’s got this big emphasis on ordinary life. There’s one koan that says, ‘Ordinary mind is the Way.’” — Henry Shukman
On the koan ‘gateless gate’: “The ‘gateless gate’ means there’s no gateway. It’s all one. How can there be a gateway? It’s gateless. But, there’s realizing that. So, that’s a kind of gate. Before we realize it, there’s a gate. After we realize it, there’s no gate … Before we awaken, there’s a gateway. Once we’re through the gateway and awakened, there’s no gateway. It’s just one awareness, one body, one consciousness, one reality, one marvel—and it’s just functioning all the time as this very moment in all its details.” — Henry Shukman
On the koan ‘what’s the sound of one hand clapping?’ “Every koan is about dropping the separate self and falling back into boundlessness. It’s the same with this koan. The idea is that we know what two hands clapping sounds like, but do you know what one hand sounds like? It’s slightly strange language—the sound of one hand—but, actually, it’s the same thing. It’s an invitation. What do we find one hand is when the separate self is gone? It’s inviting a deep experience—a deep sense of things. What is it in the boundlessness? What is one thing—a pen, a hand, a leaf, a car, a door, a seat, a bird—in that boundlessness? What is it really? In a way, the koan’s not like, ‘Well, here’s the answer’. It’s more like what do we experience from it? You could say it’s a move from dual—two hands—to one—all inclusive one. It seems like it’s some riddle about hands and one hand. It’s not. It’s an invitation to awaken from duality into nonduality. People who haven’t practiced with koans might get the idea that they’re sort of puzzles or riddles, but they’re not. They’re invitations to awaken out of dualistic mind.” — Henry Shukman
Henry Shukman Quotes on Inquiry & Awakening
“That’s the big matter: what is our life about? I found myself. I found who I really am. I found a kind of answer. Home. Peace. Love.” — Henry Shukman
“What we awaken to when we awaken: finding we’re part of everything, finding in some sense it’s all empty, finding that it’s all arising right now, that we’re inseparable from it, and all creatures and all creation is participating in it.” — Henry Shukman
“Human living is the arena for awakening to happen … We’re human in order to awaken, but we awaken in order to be human. After awakening, or as we get clearer and clearer in the process of awakening, we must live our human side ever more fully, and ever more helpfully, and ever less harmingly.” — Henry Shukman
“I don’t regard awakening as a religious thing at all. I think it’s an intrinsic fact of our existence that we do not normally see.” — Henry Shukman
“Awakening shows us a boundless love which is the ultimate agent of healing. Awakening gives us the space for our trauma to release itself. It gives us the space for our own conditioning to untie itself. It gives us the space to be freer from conditioning and to act and live more consciously, more helpfully.” — Henry Shukman
“What happens in a moment of awakening is this shift where you discover something that had been going on all along anyway that you just hadn’t noticed.” — Henry Shukman
“I just saw, ‘Oh my god, I’m not anybody. There’s no one here’ … This ‘me’ that I’ve taken myself to be doesn’t actually exist and never has.” — Henry Shukman
“There was this sense of being this reality that had no space or no time in it.” — Henry Shukman
“One recognizes that all living beings are identical to true nature.” — Henry Shukman
“I felt like the very fabric of the cosmos was my fabric.” — Henry Shukman
“I am simply no different from what I’m seeing.” — Henry Shukman
Henry Shukman Quotes on Peace & Happiness
“If happiness is conditional, it’s not really happiness.” — Henry Shukman
“The fundamental existence is available to us all the time, so that’s where the unconditional well-being is to be found.” — Henry Shukman
“It’s about letting go, it’s about trusting, it’s about less effort.” — Henry Shukman
“It’s finding through a kind of effortlessness that we we don’t need all those efforts. It’s actually always here. We’re always living in a kind of infinite support.” — Henry Shukman
“Out of the state of rest, a deeper, clearer awareness emerges by itself … We could almost call it a rest from the project of being human.” — Henry Shukman
“In the heart of every moment, there’s an infinite love available always.” — Henry Shukman
“Recognize more and more the miracle of right now—just being able to be aware, and talk, and share thoughts, and be experiencing the richness of this moment. Why would we look for more? It’s all here right now.” — Henry Shukman
Henry Shukman Quotes on Separate & Inseparable
“We discover that we are utterly inseparable.” — Henry Shukman
“The self that defines itself by separation is only a self because it’s not all other things. That is its definitional condition.” — Henry Shukman
“All we’re doing is just releasing, we’re just letting go. We got this kind of like a coagulation or a contraction into this sense of self that’s separate, and we’re just releasing it. When it releases, we see, ‘Whoa, it was never really here—not the way I thought. It just invented itself and believed in itself, and we just release.” — Henry Shukman
“What we find we are is inseparable—total inseparableness.” — Henry Shukman
“Our existence cannot any longer be considered separate.” — Henry Shukman
“In a nutshell, I found that I wasn’t just sort of part of everything—like a part within a whole—I just was the whole. What I really was, was not this separate sense of being a ‘me’ … I found that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I wasn’t this sort of separate being. I was everything. There was one whole that included everything, and that’s what I was—and the ordinary ‘me’ was gone.” — Henry Shukman
Henry Shukman Quotes on Everything & Nothing
“I just was everything, and what that everything was, was kind of also somehow empty.” — Henry Shukman
“Everything is present, and nothing is left out. We find that we’re so easily just home with everything.” — Henry Shukman
“Everything is actually nothing, but that nothing is very busy all the time making everything, being everything.” — Henry Shukman
“Whether it’s a discovery or the recovery of something long forgotten doesn’t matter because it hasn’t been present to me. When it suddenly is, it changes everything.” — Henry Shukman
“Everything is in fact singular—all the multiplicity phenomena are all one, and we are part of that one.” — Henry Shukman
“Add nothing. Just sit and watch.” — Henry Shukman
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