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

To give up yourself without regret is the greatest charity.

If you use your mind to look for a Buddha, you won’t see the Buddha.

To have a body is to suffer.

The mind is always present. You just don’t see it.

People who don’t see their own nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are liars and fools.

Everything good and bad comes from your own mind. To find something beyond the mind is impossible.

To see nothing is to perceive the Way, and to understand nothing is to know the Dharma, because seeing is neither seeing nor not seeing, and because understanding is neither understanding nor not understanding.

As mortals, we’re ruled by conditions, not by ourselves.

The awareness of mortals falls short. As long as they’re attached to appearances, they’re unaware that their minds are empty. And by mistakenly clinging to the appearance of things they lose the Way.

To seek is to suffer. To seek nothing is bliss.

Everything sacred, nothing sacred.

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

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

But deluded people don’t realize that their own mind is the Buddha. They keep searching outside.

But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.

The essence of the Way is detachment. And the goal of those who practice is freedom from appearances.

We must leave the entire collection of conditioned thought behind and let ourselves be led by the inner thread of silence into the unknown, beyond where all paths end, to that place where we go innocently or not at all, not once but continually.

Most people don’t get out of childhood, or adolescence, without being wounded for telling the truth. Someone says ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you shouldn’t say that’ or ‘that wasn’t appropriate’.

Even when I was still a child I cut out pictures of prams from newspapers and imagined the feeling of pushing my own pram through fresh winter snow and seeing the wheels’ tracks behind me in the snow.

The difference lies in the intention behind wanting money. Your reasons for why you want to create more money is typically why you’re ambitious to get it. You’re either genuinely ambitious or selfishly hungry.

Everyone moves for reason. You need a reason to leave everything behind.

Sometimes there aren’t reasons behind the terrible things that go on.

When you get on the boat that’s saving you, don’t pull up the ladder behind you

This cross-section of people they just happen to bring in to decide the fate of mankind on television is really scary.