Zen is all-inclusive. It never denies, it never says no to anything; it accepts everything and transforms it into a higher reality.
Let this become your key – next time when anger comes, just watch it. Don’t say.
I am not a logician. I am an existentialist. I believe in this meaningless, beautiful chaos of existence, and I am ready to go with it wherever it leads.
Zen is a kind of unlearning. It teaches you how to drop that which you have learned, how to become unskillful again, how to become a child again, how to start existing without mind again, how to be here without any mind.
Zen is a totally different kind of religion. It brings humanness to religion. It is not bothered about anything superhuman; its whole concern is how to make ordinary life a blessing.
For Zen, man is the goal; man is the end unto himself. God is not something above humanity, God is something hidden within humanity. Man is carrying God in himself as a potentiality.
Zen says everything is divine so how can anything be special? All is special. Nothing is non-special so nothing can be special.
Zen has no theory. It is a non-theoretical approach into reality. It has no doctrine and no dogma – hence it has no church, no priest, no pope.
The feminine is more powerful than the masculine, the soft is more powerful than the hard, the water is more powerful than the rock.
Yes, when you see for the first time, a great laughter arises in you – the laughter about the whole ridiculousness of your misery, the laughter about the whole foolishness of your problems, the laughter about the whole absurdity of your suffering.
The disciple is not hankering for knowledge; he wants to see, not to know. He wants to be. He is no longer interested in having more knowledge; he wants to have more being.
Zen is not morality, it is aesthetics. It does not impose a code of morality. it does not give you any commandments: do this, don’t do that.
A Zen master used to say, It is clear and so it is hard to see. A dunce once searched for a fire with a lighted lantern. Had he known what fire was, he could have cooked his rice much sooner.
Zen says: be empty. Look without any idea. Look into the nature of things but with no idea, with no prejudice, with no presupposition.
The modern mind has lost all capacity to wonder. It has lost all capacity to look into the mysterious, into the miraculous – because of knowledge, because it thinks it knows.
You and your brain are two things. The brain is your machinery just like everything else is your machinery. This hand is my mechanism; I use it. My brain is my mechanism; I use it.
Zen people love Buddha so tremendously that they can even play jokes upon him. It is out of great love; they are not afraid.
The moment you enter into the world of words you start falling away from that which is. The more you enter into language, the farther you are away from existence.
Zen is non-serious. Zen has a tremendous sense of humor. No other religion has evolved so much that it can have that sense of humor.
The future of humanity will move closer and closer toward the approach of Zen, because the meeting of the East and West is possible only through something like Zen, which is earthly and yet unearthly.