Zen Proverb

What you possess, you lose.

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

What was never lost can never be found.

To follow the path, look to the master, follow the master, walk with the master, see through the master, become the master.

Let go over a cliff, die completely, and then come back to life – after that you cannot be deceived.

When an ordinary man attains knowledge, he is a sage; when a sage attains understanding, he is an ordinary man.

Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

I’ve been up the mountain and I had a choice. Should I come down? So I came down. God said, Okay, you’ve been up on the mountain, now you go down. You’re on your own, free. Check in later, but now you’re on your own.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

Buddha means awareness, the awareness of body and mind that prevents evil from arising in either.

You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be awakened by all things.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

Zazen is an activity that is an extension of the universe. Zazen is not the life of an individual, it’s the universe that’s breathing.

You should study not only that you become a mother when your child is born, but also that you become a child.

It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one’s exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first — rock and roll or Christianity.

[on enlightenment] Body and mind dropped off.

Tao in the world is like a river flowing home to the sea.

Nothing ever exists entirely alone. Everything is in relation to everything else.