“This building we’re in has doors and windows. If we close the doors and windows, we can’t get out.”

In the face of impermanence, if your next thought is good, this is what we call the realization body.

Reading texts is no substitute for meditation and practicing Zen. If you read a book about a place, and you want to go there, you don’t keep reading the book.

When you are free of form and not confused, you are focused. To be free of form externally is ‘Zen.’ Not to be confused internally is ‘meditation.’ External Zen and internal meditation, this is what we mean by ‘Zen meditation.

When you’re blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being. When you’re aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.

There’s not even any leaving. What we see are flowers in the sky, the moon in the water. As for the meditative powers of Zen masters like Hsu-yun, sometimes it’s useful to meditate and sometimes it isn’t.

When the bus driver gets off the bus, who shuts the door?

When you have a memorable story about who you are and what your mission is, your success no longer depends on how experienced you are or how many degrees you have or who you know. A good story transcends boundaries, breaks barriers, and opens doors.

My next door neighbor just had a pacemaker installed. They’re still working the bugs out, though. Every time he makes love, my garage door opens.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he’d have had to bring a picnic lunch.

I don’t have wild dogs chasing people with scripts away from my door. I get my share. I’ve done okay. But I usually do independent stuff because that’s mostly what I’m offered.

When you oppress people either by gender, by race, by sexual orientation, when you do that and the doors become ajar, they will fly open and they will come and they have.

My kids hear me behind my door, giggling like an idiot, and they roll their eyes at the blatant indignity of it all.

We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life’s dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes.