This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
The Way is perfect like vast space where nothing is lacking and nothing is in excess. Indeed, it is due to our choosing to accept or reject that we do not see the true nature of things. Live neither in the entanglements of outer things, nor in the inner feeling of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things, nor in the inner feeling of emptiness. Be serene in the oneness of things and such erroneous views will disappear by themselves. When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very efforts fills you with activity. As long as you remain in one extreme or the other, you will never know Oneness.
Excess | Extreme | Nature | Nothing | Oneness | Space | Will |
True conversation is an interpenetration of worlds, a genuine intercourse of souls, which doesn’t have to be self-consciously profound but does have to touch matters of concern to the soul... Conversation may also relive us from the pressures of everyday activity and decision-making, opening us up to undisclosed levels of our experience. Soul resides in the overtones and undertones, not in the flat body of literal events. Conversation performs a pleasurable and gentle alchemy on experience, sublimating it into forms that can be examined. Experience itself takes wing from conversation... Conversation is the sex act of the soul, and as such it is supremely conducive to the cultivation of intimacy.
Alchemy | Body | Conversation | Cultivation | Decision | Events | Experience | Self | Soul |
Your enjoyment of the world is never right, till every morning you awake in Heaven; see yourself in your Father’s Palace; and look upon the skies, the earth, and the air as Celestial Joys; having such a reverend esteem of all, as if you were among the angels.
Angels | Earth | Enjoyment | Esteem | Father | Heaven | Right | World |
All the worlds a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurses arms. Then the whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress eyebrow. Then a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannons mouth. And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lind, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; and so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon dotard, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound. Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing. As You Like It (Jaques at II, vii)
Age | Ends | Good | Man | Men | Reputation | Time | Wise | World |
A bulky staff implies a division of responsibility, slowness of action, and indecision; whereas a small staff implies activity and concentration of purpose.
Action | Indecision | Purpose | Purpose | Responsibility |
Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman
A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
All human activity is prompted by desire.
Desire |
Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great works springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape from the dreary exile of the actual world.
Aspiration | Life | Life | Men | Nature | Reason | Thought | World | Aspiration | Thought |
Nothing, in truth, has such a tendency to weaken not only the powers of invention, but the intellectual powers in general, as a habit of extensive and various reading without reflection. The activity and force of mind are gradually impaired in consequence of disuse; and, not infrequently, all our principles and opinions come to be lost in the infinite multiplicity and discordancy of our acquired ideas.
Force | Habit | Ideas | Invention | Mind | Nothing | Principles | Reading | Reflection | Truth |
Compassion is the effortless radiance of emptiness, free of concepts and beyond description. That is how a buddha’s activity for beings can be limitless. If you understand this, you will know that even when a cool breeze blows upon a sick person burning with fever, that itself is the blessings and compassion of the buddhas.
Blessings | Compassion | Will | Understand |