hagakure quotes

If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way.


But there is one transcending level, and this is the most excellent of all. This person is aware of the endlessness of entering deeply into a certain Way and never thinks of himself as having finished. He truly knows his own insufficiencies and never in his whole life thinks that he has succeeded. He has no thoughts of pride but with self-abasement knows the Way to the end. It is said that Master Yagyu once remarked, "I do not know the way to defeat others, but the way to defeat myself."


When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. Above all, the Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is going to happen next, and in querying every item day or night.


If one does not get it into his head from the very beginning that the world is full of unseemly situations, for the most part his demeanor will be poor and he will not be believed by others.


It is not good to settle into a set of opinions. it is a mistake to put forth effort and obtain some understanding and then stop at that. At first putting forth great effort to be sure that you have grasped the basics, then practicing so that they may come to fruition is something that will never stop for your whole lifetime. Do not rely on following the degree of understanding that you have discovered, but simply think, "this is not enough."


"As a human being, what is essential in terms of purpose and discipline?"
"It is to become of the mind that is right now pure and lacking complications."


There is nothing outside the thought of the immediate moment.


There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

HAND, HAND, FINGERS, THUMB / Al Perkins

Hand Hand Fingers Thumb
One thumb One thumb Drumming on a drum.
One hand Two hands Drumming on a drum.
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.
Rings on fingers.
Rings on thumb. Drum drum Drum drum Drum drum drum.
Monkeys drum…
…and monkeys hum. Hum drum Hum drum Hum drum hum.
Hand picks an apple.
Hand picks a plum. Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.
Monkeys come And monkeys go.
Hands with handkerchiefs. Blow! Blow! Blow!
“Hello Jack.” “Hello Jake.”
Shake hands Shake hands Shake! Shake! Shake!
“Bye-bye Jake.”
“Bye-bye Jack.” Dum ditty Dum ditty Whack! Whack! Whack!
Hands play banjos Strum strum strum.
Hands play fiddles Zum zum zum.
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum,
Hand in hand More monkeys come.
Many more fingers. Many more thumb. Many more monkeys. Many more drums.
Millions of fingers! Millions of thumbs! Millions of monkeys Drumming on drums!
Dum ditty Dum ditty Dum dum dum.

Joseph Campbell / The Power of Myth

"Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature."

Henry David Thoreau

I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be a success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?

Rumi

Be crumbled.
So wild flowers will come up
Where you are.
You have been stony for too many years.
Try something different. Surrender.

Inscription for a Gravestone - Robinson Jeffers

I am not dead, I have only become inhuman:
That is to say,
Undressed myself of laughable prides and infirmities,
But not as a man
Undresses to creep into bed, but like an athlete
Stripping for the race.
The delicate ravel of nerves that made me a measurer
Of certain fictions
Called good and evil; that made me contract with pain
And expand with pleasure;
Fussily adjusted like a little electroscope:
That's gone, it is true;
(I never miss it; if the universe does,
How easily replaced!)
But all the rest is heightened, widened, set free.
I admired the beauty
While I was human, now I am part of the beauty.
I wander in the air,
Being mostly gas and water, and flow in the ocean;
Touch you and Asia
At the same moment; have a hand in the sunrises
And the glow of this grass.
I left the light precipitate of ashes to earth
For a love-token.

J. Krishnamurti

Why is there this urge to identify, to be attached? Why is one human being attached to another? Does not attachment breed fear, fear of losing what one is attached to? Being attached, you may become jealous, frightened, anxious, which are obvious phenomena. You are attached because of your own insufficiency, loneliness. And so out of your own insufficiency, loneliness, a sense of lacking, you cling to another. So is attachment love? Where there is attachment there must be exploitation. And we use that word love to cover up all this. And is love jealousy? None of these things exist as attachment when you have understood that that emptiness in yourself can never be filled by something else. You have to look at it. You have to not escape from it, observe it totally. […] In attachment there is fear, there is anxiety, there is hate, all the conflicts in relationship; and where there is conflict can there be love?