Famous Wei Wu Wei Quotes
“Play your part in the comedy, but don't identify yourself with your role!”
Why Lazarus Laughed: The Essential Doctrine, Zen — Advaita — Tantra (1960)
Part One : The Crossroads, p. 7
Ask the Awakened: the Negative Way (1963)
“One must know that one is not in order to be able to understand that we are.”
Ask the Awakened: the Negative Way (1963)
Foreword
All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)
Wei Wu Wei Quotes about understanding
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
Why Lazarus Laughed: The Essential Doctrine, Zen — Advaita — Tantra (1960)
Context: Doctrines, scriptures, sutras, essays, are not to be regarded as systems to be followed. They merely contribute to understanding. They should be for us a source of stimulation, and nothing more... Adopted, rather than used as a stimulus, they are a hindrance
Wei Wu Wei Quotes about the truth
“The seeing of Truth cannot be dualistic (a 'thing' seen).”
All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)
Context: The seeing of Truth cannot be dualistic (a 'thing' seen). It cannot be seen by a see-er, or via a see-er. There can only be a seeing which itself is Truth.
All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)
“In order to be effective truth must penetrate like an arrow — and that is likely to hurt.”
Posthumous Pieces (1968)
Wei Wu Wei Quotes
Foreword
All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)
Context: There seems never to have been a time at which sentient beings have not escaped from the dungeon of individuality. In the East liberation was elaborated into a fine art, but it may be doubted whether more people made their escape from solitary confinement outside the organised religions than by means of them.
In the West reintegration was sporadic, but in recent years it has become a widespread preoccupation. Unfortunately its technical dependence on oriental literature — sometimes translated by scholars whose knowledge of the language was greater than their understanding of the subject — has proved a barrier which rendered full comprehension laborious and exceedingly long. Therefore it appears to be essential that such teaching as may be transmissible shall be given in a modern idiom and in accordance with our own processes of thought. But this presentation can never be given by the discursive method to which we are used for the acquisition of conceptual knowledge, for the understanding required is not conceptual and therefore is not knowledge.
This may account for the extraordinary popularity of such works as the Tao Te Ching, and in a lesser degree for that of the Diamond and Heart Sutras and Padma Sambhava's Knowing the Mind. For despite the accretion of superfluous verbiage in which the essential doctrine of some of the latter has become embedded, their direct pointing at the truth, instead of explaining it, goes straight to the heart of the matter and allows the mind itself to develop its own vision. An elaborately developed thesis must always defeat its own end where this subject matter is concerned, for only indication could produce this understanding, which requires an intuitional faculty, and it could never be acquired wholesale from without.
“The Buddha forbore to specify: as long as there is any "one" to suffer — he will.”
Posthumous Pieces (1968)
“Living should be perpetual and universal benediction.”
Why Lazarus Laughed: The Essential Doctrine, Zen — Advaita — Tantra (1960)
“Realisation is a matter of becoming conscious of that which is already realised.”
Ask the Awakened: the Negative Way (1963)
The Tenth Man : The Great Joke (1966)
“The Saint is a man who disciplines his ego. The Sage is a man who rids himself of his ego.”
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
Fingers Pointing Towards The Moon (1958)
“All the evil in the world, and all the unhappiness, comes from the I-concept.”
Ask the Awakened: the Negative Way (1963)
“There is no mystery whatever — only inability to perceive the obvious.”
All Else Is Bondage : Non-Volitional Living (1964)
