When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything.

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

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

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

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

Just to be alive is enough.

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

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself.

Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

What Zen wants us to do is to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

When both body and mind are at peace, all things appear as they are: perfect, complete, lacking nothing.

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.

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.

Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.

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

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.

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.

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

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

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.

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

The basic teaching of Buddhism is the teaching of transiency, or change.

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.

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

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

The superior person is like water, bringing benefit to all without competing.

Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.

The Buddha and all sentient beings are nothing but expressions of the one mind. There is nothing else.

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

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

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

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

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

Meditation in the midst of activity is a thousand times superior to meditation in stillness.

The instant you speak about a thing, you miss the mark.

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

All beings by nature are Buddha, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddha.

The menu is not the meal.

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

Wherever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.

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

The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded.

The treasure house within you contains everything, and you are free to use it. You don't need to seek outside.

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.

The true understanding is that the practice itself is enlightenment.

Whoever told you that practice and enlightenment are separate?

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

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