When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, ‘What do I need to get to be happy?’ the question becomes, ‘What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?’
To Zen, time and eternity are one.
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything. That is to understand Zen.
I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon...
You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.
When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown.
The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?
The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.
Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.
As soon as you raise a thought and begin to form an idea of it, you ruin the reality itself, because you then attach yourself to form.
The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.
The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.
Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions; Zen is wedded to poetry.