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

The obstacle is the path.

When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point.

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

The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.

We should find perfect existence through imperfect existence.

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Zazen is not step-by-step meditation. Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha's Wisdom.

Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft can you be extremely hard and strong.

Even if you speak of 'understanding,' this understanding is not a matter of knowledge. It is what fills the entire body and mind.

If you forget yourself, you become the universe.

When the mind is ready to understand, the truth will come to meet it.

The awareness that you are here, right now, is the ultimate fact.

A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Zen is not necessarily against words, but it is well aware of their limitations.

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.

Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue it. This is the secret of practice.

Intrinsically all living beings are Buddhas, just as ice and water are of the same substance.

Moment after moment, completely devote yourself to listening to your inner voice.

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

If you want to climb a mountain, begin at the top.

The world is its own magic.

The archer ceases to be conscious of himself as the one who is engaged in hitting the bull's-eye which confronts him. This state of unconsciousness is realized only when, completely empty and rid of the self, he becomes one with the perfecting of his technical skill.

Birth and death are neither two things nor one thing. Life is not an appearance, death is not a disappearance.

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

Buddhas and ordinary beings are not two. Enlightenment and delusion are not different paths.

When you listen to someone, you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions.

The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the dharma gate of joyful ease.

Zen is a way of life, not a theory or a piece of knowledge to be stored away in our minds.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

In the spring, hundreds of flowers; in autumn, a harvest moon; in the summer, a refreshing breeze; in winter, snow will accompany you. If useless things do not hang in your mind, any season is a good season for you.

Time passes unhindered. When we make ourselves better, we make the world better.

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

Instead of having a deep understanding of the teaching, we need a strong confidence in our teaching, which says that originally we have Buddha nature.

Life and death are of supreme importance. Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost. Each of us should strive to awaken. Awaken! Take heed, do not squander your life.

Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Everybody has the light of Buddha within, but they don't look for it.

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.

The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.

Just to be alive is enough.

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

Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.

As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.

The most important things in our practice are our physical posture and our way of breathing.

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

Each of you is perfect the way you are... and you can use a little improvement.

Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks.

When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you intuit dharma intimately.

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

When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring wood: all these I do in Zen.

The true understanding is that the practice itself is enlightenment.

To see nothing is to perceive the Way, and to understand nothing is to know the Dharma.

The role of Zen is neither to stand above life nor to run away from it, but to face it with a spirit of determination.

Where there is great doubt, there is great awakening; small doubt, small awakening; no doubt, no awakening.

The menu is not the meal.