“I do not need any writing, since I transmit teaching beyond words and ideas.”

Life and death are important. Don’t suffer them in vain.

According to the Sutras, evil deeds result in hardships and good deeds result in blessings.

Don’t hate life and death or love life and death. Keep your every thought free of delusion, and in life you’ll witness the beginning of nirvana, and in death you’ll experience the assurance of no rebirth.

Those who remain unmoved by the wind of joy silently follow the Path.

In order to see a fish you must watch the water

Our true buddha-nature has no shape. And the dust of affliction has no form.

Not engaging in ignorance is wisdom.

The ignorant mind, with its infinite afflictions, passions, and evils, is rooted in the three poisons. Greed, anger, and delusion.

Regardless of what we do, our karma has no hold on us.

The Way is basically perfect. It doesn’t require perfecting. The Way has no form or sound. It’s subtle and hard to perceive. It’s like when you drink water: you know how hot or cold it is, but you can’t tell others.

When we’re deluded there’s a world to escape. When we’re aware, there’s nothing to escape.

When you don’t understand, you depend on reality. When you do understand, reality depends on you.

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.

Buddhas don’t practice nonsense.

And as long as you’re subject to birth and death, you’ll never attain enlightenment.

Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn’t exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty, committing evil isn’t wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception.

A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like arse-holes, in that everyone has one.

An idea, like a machine, must have power applied to it before it can accomplish anything.

All Buddhas preach emptiness. Why? Because they wish to crush the concrete ideas of the students. If a student even clings to an idea of emptiness, he betrays all Buddhas.

Swamps and bogs are places of transition and wild growth, breeding grounds, experimental labs where organisms and ideas have the luxury of being out of the spotlight, where the imagination can mutate and mate, send tendrils into and out of the water.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were – whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.

Elizabeth. Only the strongest people have the pluck to change their minds, and say so, if they see they have been wrong in their ideas.