Four for Monday.

* The Most Amazing Halloween Costume Ever. (via Steve)

* Whose America? Mark Bauerlein and Duke's own Priscilla Wald debate a new Harvard anthology of American literature.

* Tetris zen.

* A collection of bank robbery notes. There was apparently a successful robbery at the Wachovia on 9th Street a few weeks ago, so look for that one on the site soon.

Zen for an historic election.

Your inside is out and your outside is in.
—John Lennon

Change in all things is sweet.
—Aristotle

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
—Kierkegaard

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
—Carl Gustav Jung

Talk does not cook rice.
—Ancient Proverb

Here and now, boys!
—Aldous Huxley

(Zen)

Zen.

If the teaching doesn't feel like it's forcing something upon you, it's not good teaching.
—Shunryu Suzuki

When it is winter, speak cold; when it is summer, speak hot.
—Chao-chou

Don't draw another's bow, don't ride another's horse, don't mind another's business.
—Ta-hui

However innumerable sentient beings, I vow to save them. However inexhaustible the passions, I vow to extinguish them. However immeasurable the dharmas, I vow to master them. However incomparable the Buddha's truth, I vow to attain it.
—The Four Vows

To ask the hard question is simple.
—W. H. Auden

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
—Zola Neale Hurston

From birth to death, it's just like this.
—Zen saying

Monk: "What is the greatest obstacle to enlightenment?"
The Buddha: "Laziness!"

Zen for yet another first day of school.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
—Peter B. Medwar

The artist has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time; he has to look at life as he did when he was a child.... The first step towards creation is to see everything as it really is, and that demands a constant effort.
—Henri Matisse

You are already complete. You just don't know it.
—Zen saying

Really can't believe it's already August Zen.

What is the mind like if it's not occupied with plans and schemes, and fears that the plans and schemes will fail? What if your unexamined beliefs were to fall away and you were to live without them, and also to live without the thought that you had given anything up?
—John Tarrant

When you get free from certain fixed concepts of the way the world is, you find it is far more subtle, and far more miraculous, than you thought it was.
—Alan Watts

The poor long for riches, the rich long for heaven, but the wise long for a state of tranquility.
—Swami Rama

The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
—Arthur Conan Doyle

Fire can't burn fire.
—Zen saying

Enjoying my day off Zen.

I fear nothing, I hope for nothing, I am free.
—Nikos Kazantzakis

Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.
—The Diamond Sutra

Year after year
  on the monkey's face
    a monkey face.
—Bashō

What else is there to say? We end in joy.
—Theodore Roethke

You maniacs, you blew it up Battlestar Galactica Zen.

A permanent state of transition is man's most noble condition.
—Juan Ramon Jimenez

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
—Joseph Campbell

The first question I ask when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
—John Cage

The question is the same, the answer is the same. Sand in the rice, thorns in the mud.
—Zen commentary

One must ask children and birds how strawberries and cherries taste.
—Goethe

All things that are born must die. Work hard for your own freedom from sorrow.
—The Buddha

Someday my papers will be finished/ dirty hippie Zen.

If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.
—D. T. Suzuki

America has Zen students in the past, has them in the preesnt, and will have many of them in the future. They mingle easily with so-called worldlings. They play with children; respect kings and beggars; and handle gold and silver as pebbles and stones
—Nyogen Senzaki

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
—Theodore Rubin

I threw my cup away when I saw a child drinking from his hands at the trough.
—Diogenes

Sean Penn is apparently experimenting with endorsement by Zen koan.

”I don't have a candidate I'm supporting and I'm certainly interested and excited by the hope that Barack Obama is inspiring,” he said, but went on to accuse him of a “phenomenally inhuman and unconstitutional” voting record.

”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn't become a greater man than he will ever be,” Penn said.

A few projects are taking me longer than they should have, which is why blogging's been so light. But with the help of my new MacBook I should be all caught up by Monday.

Here's a little Zen.

Count no day lost in which you waited your turn, took only your share, and sought advantage over no one.
—Robert Brault

The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties in your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the starts, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

A great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.
—Mencius

Water doesn't wash water. Gold isn't changed for gold.
—T'en-T'ung

You are the music while the music lasts.
—T.S. Eliot

Surely some revelation is at hand Zen.

Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
—Henry David Thoreau

The subject matter of poetry is not that "collection of solid, static objects extended in space" but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it. Reality is things as they are.
—Wallace Stevens

If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
—Seng-Ts'an

Are you afraid of this happiness?
—The Buddha

Tuesday morning Zen.

We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love.
—Salman Rushdie

The flowers fall, for all our yearning; weeds grow, regardless of our dislike.
—Zen saying

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
—Theordore Roethke

The mouse eats cat food.
The cat bowl is broken.
What does this mean?
—Zen koan

Behind all this, some great happiness is hiding.
—Yehuda Amichai

Zen for a day without blogging.

Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life—after that you cannot be deceived.
—Zen saying

Men who wish to know about the world must learn about its particular details.
—Herakleitos

We do not understand that life is paradise, for it suffices only to wish to understand it, and at once paradise will appear in front of us in its beauty.
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Take long walks in storm weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
—Henry David Thoreau

A homeless bird
looks cold
in the wintry blast.
—Sampu

So let us go forward, quietly, each on his own path, forever making for the light.
—Vincent Van Gogh

To compliment my culturemonkey post on death and the apocalyptic last Friday, here's just a little death Zen.

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton

You will always exist in the universe in one form or another.
—Shunryu Suzuki

Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying, or lamentation—this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it.
—Dōgen

Perfectionism is slow death.
—Hugh Prather

Monk: "How should I escape birth and death?"
Shih-kung: "What is the use of escaping it?"
—Zen mondo

Super Tuesday Zen:

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.
—Oscar Wilde

The satiated man and the hungry man do not see the same thing when they look upon a loaf of bread.
—Rumi

We boil at different degrees.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything flows from your own heart.
—Fa-yen

Open your mouth and you're wrong.
—Zen saying

That time of year Zen:

The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths.
—Adrienne Rich

End of the semester, papers mostly done Zen.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis,
no cultivation, no intention;
Let it settle itself.
—Tilopa

You can outdistance that which is running after you, but now what is running inside you.
—Rwandan proverb

Each of you is perfect as you are. And you all could use a little bit of improvement.
—Shunryu Suzuki

A monk of Kassan's went to Kotei and had just bowed to him when Kotei struck him on the back. The monk bowed again, Kotei struck himn again. The monk went away, and when he told Kassan about this," Kassan asked: "Do you understand?"

"No," the monk replied.

"That's a good thing," said Kassan, "for if you did, I'd have been amazed."
—Zen mondo

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Everybody's favorite part of the semester is upon us again. I fear that only Zen can see us through.

I paint a window just as I look out of a window. If a window looks wrong in a picture open, I draw the curtain and shut it, just as I would in my own room. One must act in a painting as in life, directly.
—Pable Picasso

The invariable mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Day begins with the morning bell.
Night is long, empty moon still in the sky.
Everything must end.
—Fujiwara no Ietaka

Now that I've shed my skin completely,
one true reality alone exists.
—Zen saying

In a Nasreddin story, we see him crossing the frontier each day with mules laden with sacks. Each time, the sacks are searched, but nothing is found. And Nasreddin continues to cross the frontier with his mules. Long afterwards, they ask him what in fact it was he was smuggling. And Nasreddin replies: "I was smuggling mules."
—Baudrillard

Reinstalling Windows Zen.

Go in fear of abstractions.
—Ezra Pound

If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.
—Lin-Chi

Yakusan's death was just like his life. On the verge of dying he yelled out: "The hall's falling down! The hall's falling down!"

The monks scrambled to prop it up with various things. Yakusan threw up his hands and said: "None of you understand what I mean." And then he died.
—Zen Mondo

"Just ask, just ask!"
  says the dew,
    and rolls away.
—Issa

For studying literature Zen, one should have quiet quarters. Be moderate in food and drink. Cast aside all involvements and discontinue all affairs. Do not think of good or evil; do not deal with right or wrong. Do not intend to make yourself a Buddha, much less be attached to standing still.
—Dōgen

Do not seek to find out what to do. Every what to do is only a general recipe, that is, an abstraction. You will never come back into the truth of your own being riding on the back of an abstraction. If you know what to do, [you can] be sure it is the wrong thing.
—Bernard Phillips

Pray to God, but hammer away.
—Spanish proverb

We must learn to see the world anew.
—Albert Einstein

(Zen)