“You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself.”

Unless you see your nature, all this talk about cause & effect is nonsense. Buddhas don’t practice nonsense.

The mind’s capacity is limitless, and its manifestations are inexhaustible. Seeing forms with your eyes, hearing sounds with your ears, smelling odors with your nose, tasting flavors with your tongue, every movement or state is all your mind.

The essence of the Way is detachment.

To find a Buddha all you have to do is see your nature.

Once you see your nature, sex is basically immaterial.

Whoever knows that the mind is a fiction and devoid of anything real knows that his own mind neither exists nor doesn’t exist.

Not thinking about anything is Zen. Once you know this, walking, sitting, or lying down, everything you do is Zen.

Whoever realizes that the six senses aren’t real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

The Buddha is your real body, your original mind.

The true Way is sublime. It can’t be expressed in language. Of what use are scriptures? But someone who sees his own nature finds the Way, even if he can’t read a word.

But when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won’t be focused. You’re likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn’t doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.

The ultimate Truth is beyond words. Doctrines are words. They’re not the Way.

Our nature is the mind. And the mind is our nature.

To have a body is to suffer. Does anyone with a body know peace? Those who understand this detach themselves from all that exists and stop imagining or seeking anything. The sutras say, “To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.” When you seek nothing, you’re on the Path.

But this mind isn’t somewhere outside the material body of the four elements. Without this mind we can’t move. The body has no awareness. Like a plant or a stone, the body has no nature. So how does it move? It’s the mind that moves.

Delusion means mortality. And awareness means Buddhahood.

You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation.

Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

To say that private men have nothing to do with government is to say that private men have nothing to do with their own happiness or misery; that people ought not to concern themselves whether they be naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, protected or destroyed.

Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.

Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves-or worse-deceive others.

What was the point of spending your life with someone you were always looking for ways to decieve?

And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.