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What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping? ...
by Zen Koan

What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
- Traditional Zen Koan

Related topics: Zen

The True Path is the path on which
there is no coming and no going.
- Traditional Zen Koan

Overflowing Cup of Tea:
The Zen Master poured his visitor's teacup full, and then kept pouring.
The visitor watched until he could no longer restrain himself.
"It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," the Zen Master said,
"you are full of your own opinions and assumptions.
How can you learn truth until you first empty your cup?"
- Traditional Zen Koan

Time to Die:
A Zen teacher had a rare and priceless teacup.
One day, his precocious student accidentally broke the cup.
Hearing the footsteps of his teacher,
the student held the pieces of the cup behind his back.
When the master appeared, he asked: "Why do people have to die?"
"This is natural," explained the teacher.
"Everything has to die and has just so long to live."
The student showed the shattered cup, saying,
"It was time for your cup to die."
- Traditional Zen Koan

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Thank you for joining me on this journey we call life,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The Sweetest Strawberry:
A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger.
He fled, the tiger after him.
Coming to a precipice,
he caught hold of the root of a wild vine
and swung himself over the edge.
The tiger sniffed at him from above.
Trembling, the man looked down to where,
far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him.
Only the vine sustained him.
Two mice, one white and one black,
little by little started to gnaw away the vine.
The man then saw a luscious strawberry near him.
Grasping the vine with one hand,
he plucked the strawberry with the other.
How sweet it tasted.
- Zen Koan

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen:
A thief entered the little hut of a Zen Master,
but discovered there was nothing to steal.
The Zen Master discovered the thief.
"You have come a long way to visit me," he told the prowler,
"and you should not return empty-handed.
Please take my clothes as a gift."
The thief was bewildered,
but he took the clothes and slunk away.
The Zen Master sat naked, watching the moon.
"Poor fellow," he mused,
"I wish I could have given him this beautiful moon."
- Traditional Zen Koan

A system of morality which is based
on relative emotional values
is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception
which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.
- Socrates

Visualize your end result as having already been accomplished.
Let the image of your success play on the giant screen
in full color with surround sound -
so real you can smell and taste it.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty,
the contemplation of mystery,
or the search of truth or perfection
is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession
of such days is fatal to human life.
- Lewis Mumford

True friendship is like sound health;
the value of it is seldom known until it be lost.
- Charles Caleb Colton

Music is what feelings sound like.
- Anonymous

The primal rhythmic power
and resonant sound of waves on the shore
are like the earth's heartbeat,
and become our connection with the body of nature.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The sound of 'gentle stillness' after all the thunder
and wind have passed will be the ultimate Word from God.
- Jim Elliot

AUM, the most primordial human sound -
and the sound most connected to Spirit,
is pronounced in these three parts:
A (as in mama) - a throat sound
that vibrates in the abdomen - signifies waking.
U (as in who) - a tongue sound
that vibrates in the chest - signifies dreaming.
M (as in mama) - a lip sound
that vibrates in the head - signifies sleeping.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Overwhelm is not a pleasant condition.
The to-do list overflows,
the deadlines appear imminent and immovable.
There are too many demands upon too little of your time.
Does this sound familiar?
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To the Master's honor all must turn,
each in its track, without a sound,
forever tracing Newton's ground.
- Albert Einstein

Creationists make it sound as though a "theory'
is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.
- Isaac Asimov

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition
for building up a sound education.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

Apathy, indifference, not caring...
It may sound insensitive for me to say, "I don't care,"
but ask first to what I am indifferent.
I choose to be caring, compassionate
and kind toward all people,
and I also choose to be indifferent to gossip,
petty complaints, and idle chatter.
About those, I just don't care.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

No one was ever named "Hero" for following the crowd.
Heroes set their own course.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences.
No one can eliminate prejudices -
just recognize them.
- Edward R. Murrow

Love one another but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea
between the shores of your souls.
- Khalil Gibran

The greatest mistake you can make in life
is to be continually fearing you will make one.
- Elbert Hubbard

Majority rule only works if you're also
considering individual rights,
because you can't have five wolves and one sheep
voting on what to have for dinner.
- Larry Flynt

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.
- Anais Nin

When written in Chinese, the word "crisis"
is composed of two characters.
One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
- John F. Kennedy

One does not discover new lands without consenting
to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
- Andre Gide

Take your life in your own hands, and what happens?
A terrible thing: no one to blame.
- Erica Jong

If you wait for opportunities to occur,
you will be one of the crowd.
- Edward de Bono

This day I will marry my friend,
the one I laugh with, live for, dream with, love.
- Anonymous

One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller

To know yet to think that one does not know is best;
Not to know yet to think that one knows
will lead to difficulty.
- Lao Tzu

Fear defeats more people than
any other one thing in the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal
with the intent of throwing it at someone else;
you are the one who gets burned.
- The Buddha

Try a new perspective on diversity.
Across the country and around the world,
we are all one.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men
who walked through the huts comforting others,
giving away their last piece of bread...
They offer sufficient proof that everything
can be taken from a man but one thing:
to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances,
to choose one's own way.
- Viktor E. Frankl

Friendship is born at that moment
when one person says to another,
"What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
- C. S. Lewis

One can not reflect in streaming water.
Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.
- Lao Tzu

Drop the sword - for there is but one flesh to wound,
and it is the one flesh of all humankind.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one.
- Mother Teresa

In one drop of water are found all the secrets of all the oceans.
- Khalil Gibran

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
- Joseph Campbell

Individually, we are one drop.
Together, we are an ocean.
- Ryunosuke Satoro

The essence of all religions is one.
Only their approaches are different.
- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

"Just living is not enough," said the butterfly,
"one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower."
- Hans Christian Andersen

I am one with the Earth,
with the Water, with the Fire,
with the Air that I breathe,
with all Living Things,
and we are all one with Spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The function of prayer is not to influence God,
but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.
- Soren Kierkegaard

After climbing a great hill,
one only finds that there are many more hills to climb.
- Nelson Mandela

The best relationship is one in which
your love for each other
exceeds your need for each other.
- Anonymous

Watch what people are cynical about,
and one can often discover what they lack.
- George S. Patton

Words are a lens to focus one's mind.
- Ayn Rand

Love like you've never been hurt,
dance like no one is watching,
live as though heaven is on earth.
- Satchel Paige

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth
- not going all the way and not starting.
- The Buddha

In order to discover new lands,
one must be willing to lose sight
of the shore for a very long time.
- Anonymous

"Pride" is such a double-edged sword -
Self-Worth on one edge and Ego on the other.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Each one of us has our own perspective
on everything we see in life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.
- H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

One of the surest ways to cause
yourself great suffering
is to insist upon being right -
to demand that all others view life
exactly as you view it.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.
- The Buddha

One unlikelihood entertained leads a parade of innovation.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

Money has never made man happy, nor will it,
there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness.
The more of it one has the more one wants.
- Benjamin Franklin

We have two ears and one mouth so that
we can listen twice as much as we speak.
- Epictetus

What one has to do usually can be done.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

Facts are many, but the truth is one.
- Rabindranath Tagore

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely.
It is absolutely touch and go.
Each one of us could make the difference.
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another
as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
- Thomas Jefferson

Hatred burns the one who hates.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Whatever you are, be a good one.
- Abraham Lincoln

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.
- Helen Keller

Without deep reflection,
one knows from daily life
that one exists for other people.
- Albert Einstein

It is one thing to say that something should be done,
but quite a different matter to do it.
- Aesop

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May the world be kind to you, and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie