When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
MATSUO BASHOWhen your consciousness has become ripe in true zazen-pure like clear water, like a serene mountain lake, not moved by any wind-then anything may serve as a medium for realization.
More Matsuo Basho Quotes
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Year by year, the monkey’s mask reveals the monkey.
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Summer grasses — all that remains of great soldiers’ imperial dreams.
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Learn how to listen as things speak for themselves.
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Felling a tree and gazing at the cut end – tonight’s moon.
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I felt quite at home, / As if it were mine sleeping lazily / In this house of fresh air.
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I am one who eats breakfast gazing at morning glories.
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The universe and its beings are a complementarity of empty infinity, intimate interrelationships, and total uniqueness of each and every being.
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I hope to have gathered To repay your kindness The willow leaves Scattered in the garden.
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Old dark sleepy pool… Quick unexpected frog Goes plop! Watersplash!
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On a bare branch a crow is perched – autumn evening.
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Why so scrawny, cat? Starving for fat fish or mice… Or backyard love?
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Not to think of yourself / as someone who did not count — / Festival of the Souls.
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For this lovely bowl let us arrange these flowers since there is no rice.
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Friends part forever wild geese lost in cloud.
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Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.
MATSUO BASHO