Year by year, the monkey’s mask reveals the monkey.
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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The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
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Between our two lives there is also the life of the cherry blossom.
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Poverty’s child – he starts to grind the rice, and gazes at the moon.
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Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
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The basis of art is change in the universe.
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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.
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Make the universe your companion, always bearing in mind the true nature of things-mountains and rivers, trees and grasses, and humanity-and enjoy the falling blossoms and the scattering leaves.
MATSUO BASHO -
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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Felling a tree and gazing at the cut end – tonight’s moon.
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Why so scrawny, cat? Starving for fat fish or mice… Or backyard love?
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Old pond, leap-splash – a frog.
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Harvest moon: around the pond I wander and the night is gone.
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The desire to break the silence with constant human noise is, I believe, precisely an avoidance of the sacred terror of that divine encounter.
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Winter garden, the moon thinned to a thread, insects singing.
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How I long to see among dawn flowers, the face of God.
MATSUO BASHO






