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

When dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing.

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

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.

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

The silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves.

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.

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

When you are you, Zen is Zen. Big mind is just big mind.

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

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

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

The true person is not anyone in particular. But like the deep blue color of the limitless sky, it is everyone, everywhere in the world.

In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense.

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

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

Where is the place that your original face has not yet emerged?

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

If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

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

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

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

This very body is the Buddha. And this very earth the lotus paradise.

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

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

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

Your own treasure house contains everything you need; why search outside?

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

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Should you desire the great tranquility, prepare to sweat white beads.

The mind is the root from which all things grow. If you can understand the mind, everything else is included.

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.

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

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

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

The obstacle is the path.

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

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.

To what shall I compare this life? It is like a boat that left at dawn, leaving no trace.

Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?

The world is its own magic.

The eye with which I see Buddha is the same eye with which Buddha sees me.

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

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

The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.

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.

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

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.

The color of the mountains is Buddha's body; the sound of running water is his great speech.

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

The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

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

The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.

To live – is that not enough? To love – is that not everything?

What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.

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

Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure.

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

To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.