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

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.

When mortals are alive, they worry about death. When they’re full, they worry about hunger. Theirs is the Great Uncertainty. But sages don’t consider the past. And they don’t worry about the future. Nor do they cling to the present. And from moment to moment they follow the Way.

People of this world are deluded. They’re always longing for something – always, in a word, seeking.

All the suffering and joy we experience depend on conditions.

As long as you’re enthralled by a lifeless form, you’re not free.

Worship means reverence and humility. It means revering your real self and humbling delusions. If you can wipe out evil desires and harbor good thoughts, even if nothing shows, it’s worship. Such form is its real form.

Freeing oneself from words is liberation.

Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.

First thing every morning before you arise say out loud, ‘I believe,’ three times.

All the things that truly matter, beauty, love, creativity, joy and inner peace arise from beyond the mind.

Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man’s thinking too highly of himself.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

We know that from time to time, there arise among human beings, people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun gives out heat.

Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them