When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal. No more medicine.

The mind we have when we practice zazen is the great mind: we don't try to see anything; we stop conceptual thinking; we stop emotional activity; we just sit. Whatever happens to us, we are not bothered. We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us.

When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'

Instead of criticizing, find out how to help.

Meditation opens the mind to the greatest mystery that takes place daily and hourly; it widens the heart so that it may feel the eternity of time and infinity of space in every throb; it gives us a life within the world as if we were moving about in paradise.

When you sit, everything sits with you.

We die, and we do not die.