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

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.

Just to be alive is enough.

To live is enough.

Just as parents care for their children, you should bear in mind the whole universe.

To be in harmony with the wholeness of things is not to have anxiety over imperfection.

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

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

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

The dharma wheel turns from the beginning. There is neither excess nor deficiency. The whole universe is moistened with nectar, and the truth is ready to harvest.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

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.

The obstacle is the path.

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 ocean does not reject any water; therefore it is great. The mountain does not select its stones; therefore it is great.

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

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

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

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

When walking, just walk. When sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.

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

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

The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense.

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

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

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

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

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

When you practice zazen you should not try to attain anything. You should just sit in the complete calmness of your mind and not rely on anything.

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.

The true understanding is that the practice itself is enlightenment.

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.

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

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

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

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

The mind is like a well-forged sword - it adapts to all situations.

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

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.

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

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

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 mind of the past is ungraspable; the mind of the future is ungraspable; the mind of the present is ungraspable.

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

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

Without darkness, there is no light. Without the path, there is no arrival.

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

The state of mind that exists when you sit in the right posture is, itself, enlightenment.

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

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.

If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything.

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