The heart of the path is quite simple. No need for long explanations. Give up clinging to love and hate, just rest with things as they are.

When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.

The first step toward faith is to admit that we don't know everything.

The highest mantra is to be without deception. The highest medicine is to have few desires. The highest meditation is not to be attached.

The time of the past becomes the present, the time of the present becomes the future, the time of the future becomes the present, and the time of the present becomes the past.

Personal experience is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.

Although all phenomena are empty of inherent existence, they function perfectly well.

The highest truth cannot be taught except through the conventional truth.

The root of suffering is not in the world outside us but in our own minds.

Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

True happiness is born of letting go of what is unnecessary.

The object of meditation and the mind which knows it must be noted as they occur. If they are not noted, desire arises and disturbs concentration.

When things fall apart and we're on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.

Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.

Study the Buddha's teaching which is present in every moment.

The goal of meditation is not to achieve a blank mind, but to gain insight into the nature of mind itself.

The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves.

At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully.

Recognize the emptiness of all phenomena, but do not become attached to emptiness itself.

Both formerly and now, it is only suffering that I describe, and the cessation of suffering.

Appearances are mind, mind itself is emptiness, emptiness itself is spontaneous presence.

The truth of suffering is not to be feared but to be understood through direct observation.

Through understanding emptiness, one does not become proud of one's virtues, just as one does not become proud of building a castle in the sky.

In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life.

Wisdom is not about accumulating knowledge, but about seeing through all knowledge.

Insight knowledge comes from direct experience, not from intellectual understanding.

The real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.

Our task is to learn to see clearly what is happening in each moment, rather than be lost in our reactions and judgments.

Life is an art, and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting.

The practice of mindfulness begins in the small, remote cave of your unconscious mind and blossoms with the sunlight of your conscious life.

If you forget yourself, you become the universe.