It’s difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.
— anon
So long as I keep before me the ideal of an absolute observer, of knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can only see my situation as being a source of error. But once I have acknowledged that through it I am geared to all actions and all knowledge that are meaningful to me, and that it is gradually filled with everything that may be for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of the truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is define a truth within the situation.
— Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 299
To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.
— Layman Hsiang (Cleary 1999, 93)
Seeking enlightenment apart from the world
Is like looking for horns on a hare.— Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)