• You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now.”—from Become What You Are (Location 17)
  • to “become what you are” is at once an impossible directive and an unavoidable fact. (Location 95)
  • the linguistic problems posed by expressing that variety of knowledge in words. (Location 120)
  • the highest to which man can attain is wonder; and if the prime phenomenon makes him wonder, let him be content; nothing higher can it give him, and nothing further should he seek for behind it; here is the limit. (Location 123)
  • a mechanism, (Location 136)
  • out of the union between self and life (or the world) there is born the Christ, (Location 139)
  • for no two opposites can exist unless there is a relation between them. (Location 141)
  • right. (Location 147)
    • Note: Right according to the masses? Dead and not willing to fight for what may be considered wrong?
  • a man does not really begin to be alive until he has lost himself, (Location 155)
  • released the anxious grasp which he normally holds upon his life, his property, his reputation and position. (Location 155)
  • “holy poverty,” (Location 156)
  • because all is lost—there is nothing to lose, (Location 157)
  • But most of us know that we will not, and probably cannot do it—that we shall continue to cling to our habitual ways of life with all the helplessness of addicts to a destroying passion. (Location 164)
  • I said at the beginning that the words about finding one’s life through losing it were not really a precept that could simply be practiced and obeyed. (Location 166)
  • transcending the ego (Location 167)
  • Always have a large pinch of salt handy when you meet the fellow who talks about trying to renounce himself, to overcome his ego. (Location 168)
  • Some of us will always be trying—with an exasperating degree of relative success—to improve ourselves in one way or another, and no amount of self-acceptance will stop it. (Location 180)
  • We are really stuck with ourselves, and our attempts to reject or to accept are equally fruitless, (Location 186)
  • The part of our self that wants to change our self is the very one that needs to be changed; but it is as inaccessible as a needle to the prick of its own point. (Location 188)
  • Thus the one important result of any really serious attempt at self-renunciation or self-acceptance is the humiliating discovery that it is impossible. (Location 193)
  • In this metaphorical sense, the ego dies on finding out its own incapacity, its inability to make any difference to itself that is really important. (Location 195)
  • worn as the proud badge of graduation. (Location 200)
  • Thus one of the more sickening aspects of spiritual phoniness is the usually rather subtly hinted implication that one has, after all, “suffered so much.” (Location 201)
  • effectively convinced that it cannot be done. (Location 203)
  • I have always found that the people who have quite genuinely died to themselves make no claims of any kind to their own part in the process. They think of themselves as lazy and lucky. (Location 204)
  • a strong will and a clever head makes some things very difficult to see. (Location 207)
  • trying to pretend to oneself that a life of constant self-frustration was in fact a great spiritual attainment. (Location 213)
  • Sometimes, however, talk of this kind is the really nasty kind of preaching affected by people who presume to be schoolmasters to their fellow man. But their sermons never have the slightest creative effect, since the only motives for action which they supply are shame or fear or guilt, and when we respond to such motives we find only a balm for the ego’s injured pride— (Location 215)
  • find life by losing it. (Location 219)
  • the state metaphorically called death or self-surrender is not a future condition to be acquired. It is rather a present fact. (Location 219)
  • emotions appear only as manifestations of a state of tension and resistance. If I did not dislike fear, it would not be fear. (Location 223)
  • resentment of those emotions, our unwillingness to experience them, is totally ineffectual. (Location 224)
  • And our attempts to stand above these emotions and control them are the emotions themselves at play, since love is also to be in love with love, and sadness to be sorry that one is sad. (Location 227)
  • unwillingness to feel (Location 228)
  • events toward which our sole response is a response of feeling. (Location 246)
  • the very special feelings which arise when we are faced with a conflict of feelings which cannot be resolved. (Location 247)
  • fruitless attempt to talk oneself out of them. (Location 249)
  • wisdom emerges when we give up resisting them— (Location 253)
  • sense of freedom from the bonds (Location 256)
  • But ordinarily we do not discover the wisdom of our feelings because we do not let them complete their work; we try to suppress them or discharge them in premature action, not realizing that they are a process of creation which, like birth, begins as a pain and turns into a child. (Location 257)
  • that very illusion of self-mastery which stands in the way. (Location 261)
  • when I discover that I cannot surrender myself that I am surrendered; just when I find that I cannot accept myself that I am accepted. (Location 262)
  • all this striving for self-surrender is like trying to put legs on a snake— (Location 264)
  • THE HIGHEST WISDOM lies in detachment, (Location 271)
  • Detachment means to have neither regrets for the past nor fears for the future; to let life take its course without attempting to interfere with its movement and change, neither trying to prolong the stay of things pleasant nor to hasten the departure of things unpleasant. (Location 272)
  • To do this is to move in time with life, to be in perfect accord with its changing music, and this is called Enlightenment. (Location 274)
  • Life exists only at this very moment, and in this moment it is infinite and eternal. For the present moment is infinitely small; before we can measure it, it has gone, and yet it persists for ever. (Location 276)
  • eternally resting. (Location 280)
  • if we try to accord with it, we shall get away from it. (Location 280)
  • though your thoughts may run into the past or the future they cannot escape the present moment. (Location 282)
  • thoughts are themselves of the moment; (Location 283)
  • You may believe yourself out of harmony with life and its eternal Now; but you cannot be, for you are life and exist Now— (Location 284)
  • So become what you are. (Location 286)
  • suggests that religion is a medicine rather than a diet. (Location 290)
  • Lucretius: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (Too much religion is apt to encourage evil). (Location 293)
  • it is so easy to get stuck—on the raft, (Location 299)
  • Religion, (Location 302)
  • is altogether a pointing—and it does not point at itself. (Location 303)
  • ‘‘Your everyday mind is the Tao.’’ (Location 307)
  • But this doesn’t help, either, for as soon as I try to understand what is meant by my everyday mind, and then try to latch on to it, I am just sucking another finger. (Location 308)
  • tormenting nostalgia (Location 318)
  • To see the moon, you must forget the pointing finger, and simply look at the moon. (Location 333)
  • If you want to know what reality is, you must look directly at it and see for yourself. (Location 335)
  • free from wandering words and from the floating fantasies (Location 337)
  • the only way to concentrate is to concentrate. (Location 342)
  • if you want to make this kind of thing horribly difficult, you begin to think about timing yourself. Instead of concentrating, you begin to think about whether you are concentrating, about how long you have concentrated, and about how much longer you are going to keep it up. All this is totally off the point. (Location 349)
  • Concentrate for one second. If, at the end of this time, your mind has wandered off, concentrate for another second, and then another. (Location 351)
  • Nobody ever has to concentrate for more than one second—this one. This is why it is quite literally off the point to time yourself, to compete with yourself, and to bother about your progress and success in the art. (Location 352)
  • It’s simply the old story of making a difficult job easy by taking it one step at a time. (Location 353)
  • in the state of concentration, of clear unwavering attention, one has no self—that is, no self-consciousness. (Location 355)
  • We want to enjoy ourselves, and fear that if we forget ourselves there will be no enjoyment—an entertainment without anyone present to be entertained. (Location 357)
  • For if you try to watch your mind concentrate, it will not concentrate. And if, when it is concentrated, you begin to watch for the arrival of some insight into reality, you have stopped concentrating. (Location 362)
  • so preoccupied with the idea of doing it that they never really do it at all. (Location 370)
  • If you happen to be sitting, just sit. (Location 381)
  • But don’t think and reflect unnecessarily, compulsively, from sheer force of nervous habit. (Location 381)
  • In Zen, they call this having a leaky mind— (Location 382)
  • While modern astronomy tells us of our insignificance beneath the stars, it also tells us that if we lift so much as a finger, we affect them. (Location 396)
  • your mind can function “self-so”—though most of us are much too afraid of ourselves to try the experiment. (Location 410)
  • our principal problem in life is ourselves— (Location 425)
  • the problem is the pain of trying to avoid suffering and the fear of trying not to be afraid. (Location 427)
  • according to Lao-tzu, the way back, or forward, to harmony with the Tao is, in the profoundest and most radical sense, to do nothing at all. (Location 430)
  • this special kind of doing nothing is called wu-wei—literally, nondoing or nonstriving. (Location 433)
  • the way of deliberate imitation. This is to suppose that we actually know what the sane and natural way of living is, to embody it in laws and principles, techniques and ideals, and then try by a deliberate effort of imitation to follow them. (Location 437)
  • deliberate relaxation, the way of “to hell with it all.” (Location 441)
  • This leads to a vast, sloppy, disorganized mess, or to a kind of compulsive stillness, or sometimes to an equally compulsive psychological diarrhea. (Location 442)
  • Both of these courses are far short of the real mui, of profound and radical nondoing. (Location 444)
  • mui is not seeking for any result. (Location 451)
  • I am talking of results in the moral and spiritual sphere—such things as goodness, peace of mind, sanity, happiness, personality, courage, and so forth. (Location 452)
  • a result-seeking mechanism. (Location 458)
  • This is a hopelessly and wildly fouled-up feedback mechanism. (Location 462)
  • You see yourself as a purpose-seeking creature, but realize that there is no purpose for the existence of such a creature. (Location 467)
  • Your aim is to preserve and perpetuate yourself, but in the larger context of the universe there is no reason, no purpose for this aim. (Location 468)
  • we cannot make the Tao a goal any more than we can aim an arrow at itself. (Location 477)
  • the antidote to ignorance is not action but knowledge—not what to do, but what we know. (Location 483)
  • seriousness which drags man down to the earth and kills the life (Location 497)
  • playacting (Location 498)
  • seriousness becomes a vice in the adult, (Location 500)
  • instead of playing his part, his part plays him (Location 503)
  • he takes seriously what the gods made for fun. (Location 507)
  • this detachment from is also a harmony with, (Location 522)
  • the word despair in a particular sense is the proper translation of the Hindu–Buddhist term nirvana—to “de-spirate,” to breathe out, to give up the ghost. (Location 530)
  • Asians manage to equate this despair with ultimate bliss— (Location 531)
  • Without exception, everything that we attain or create, even the memorials that survive our death, must perish without trace, and that our quest for permanence is pure futility. (Location 551)
  • happiness exists only in relation to misery, pleasure in relation to pain, (Location 552)
  • Shunyata, the Nothing beyond nothing, (Location 563)
  • Western culture is dedicated to the belief that there is a formula for happiness— (Location 570)
  • there is no Way. Nobody knows the Way. The only way that there is is the path of a bird through the sky—now you see it, now you don’t. (Location 577)
  • Life is not going anywhere; there is nothing to be attained. (Location 578)
  • All striving and grasping is so much smoke in the clutch of a dissolving hand. (Location 579)
  • everyone is dissolving into nothing, and no one can help it. (Location 582)
  • Just watching. Not trying to get anything. Not expecting anything. Not hoping. Not seeking. Not trying to relax. Just watching, without purpose. (Location 588)
  • To hold out hope, to promise a result, spoils the whole thing. (Location 589)
  • They must happen by themselves. (Location 601)
  • ALMOST EVERY FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF LIFE can be expressed in two opposite ways. (Location 605)
  • There are those who say that to attain the highest wisdom we must be still and calm, immovable in the midst of turmoil. And there are those who say that we must move on as life moves, never stopping for a moment either in fear of what is to come or to turn a regretful glance at what has gone. (Location 606)
  • receives, but does not keep. (Location 610)
  • This critique is based not so much upon a psychological analysis of the experience itself as upon purely logical analysis of such universal concepts as God, Ultimate Reality, Absolute Being, and the like— (Location 631)
  • “the universe was made by God” has seemed as much a statement of the historical type as that “the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.” (Location 654)
  • “truth” as a structure of objective reality, (Location 657)
  • a body of theory to explain the past and predict the future. (Location 660)
  • the attempt to talk about, think about, or know about ultimate Reality constitutes an impossible task. (Location 683)
  • the same way that fire can burn other things but cannot burn itself. (Location 688)
  • the unknowable need not and cannot concern us further. (Location 715)
  • The more complete kind of mind, which can feel as well as think, remains to “indulge” the odd sense of mystery which comes from contemplating the fact that everything is at base something which cannot be known. (Location 719)
  • what is specially strange is that this unknowable something is also the basis of that which otherwise I know so intimately—myself. (Location 721)
  • Western man has a peculiar passion for order and logic, such that, for him, the entire significance of life consists in putting experience into order. (Location 722)
  • sense of success, of the mind’s own competence, can be maintained. (Location 732)
  • feeling of wonder— (Location 737)
  • deliverance from the Wheel, and of seeking Reality (Location 743)
  • consciousness is a function of consciousness. (Location 757)
  • the man who really knows that he cannot grasp himself gives up, relaxes, and is at ease. (Location 780)
  • impossibility of self-knowledge. (Location 782)
  • For those who equate sanity with order this is a doctrine of pure despair. (Location 784)
  • every statement in which we think we have grasped or defined or merely designated Reality, we have uttered only nonsense. (Location 789)
  • Human life becomes a fantastic vicious circle when man tries to order and control the world and himself beyond certain limits, (Location 799)
  • faith—the recognition that one must ultimately “give in” to a life-source, a Self beyond the ego, which lies beyond the definition of thought and the control of action. (Location 825)
  • This knowing of Reality by unknowing is the psychological state of the man whose ego is no longer split or dissociated from its experiences, (Location 835)
  • who no longer feels himself as an isolated embodiment of logic and consciousness, (Location 836)
  • beware of good motives. (Location 855)
  • No hell is worse than that in which one lives without knowing it. (Location 859)
  • for all that could be written would only be ideas about Zen, not Zen itself. (Location 870)
  • whoever imagines he has explained Zen has in fact only explained it away; it can no more be bound by a definition than the wind can be shut in a box without ceasing to be wind. (Location 871)
  • Yet apparently intelligent people often make the equally ridiculous mistake of identifying a philosophical system, a dogma, a creed, with Ultimate Truth, imagining that they have found that Truth embraced in a set of propositions which appeals to their reason. (Location 874)
  • There are thousands of men and women searching through volume after volume, visiting religious societies, and attending the lectures of famous teachers in the vain hope that they will one day come upon some explanation of the mysteries of life: (Location 876)
  • the Infinite Riddle. (Location 878)
  • There are some religions and philosophies which lend themselves more easily than others to the error of mistaking the idea for the reality, (Location 879)
  • This, however, is less a reflection on those religions than on the ignorance of their devotees. (Location 881)
  • This cult is Zen, (Location 885)
  • to hold on to life “like grim death.” (Location 906)
  • Egotism is a fierce holding on to oneself; (Location 907)
  • play of life, (Location 907)
  • Whether we like it or not, change comes, and the greater the resistance, the greater the pain. (Location 908)
  • “Let go!” and “Walk on!” (Location 910)
  • Drop the craving for self, for permanence, for particular circumstances, and go straight ahead with the movement of life. (Location 911)
  • The answer is that it has no symbolic meaning, and that it is about nothing. But it is something, and that something is that very obvious but much ignored thing—life. (Location 927)
  • If he gave a reasoned answer, the disciple would be able to analyze it, to subject it to intellectual dissection, and (Location 930)
  • you feel the beauty of its song precisely because the notes do not wait for you to analyze them. (Location 934)
  • the Zen master is not trying to give you ideas about life; he is trying to give you life itself, to make you realize life in and around you, to make you live it instead of being a mere spectator, (Location 935)
  • “If you try to accord with it, you will get away from it.” (Location 942)
  • bring your own understanding and intelligence (Location 948)
  • In its prison it withers away and dies. (Location 962)
  • The doctrines of religion have their origin in attempts to convey these experiences to others by enshrining a state of mind within an idea about the universe or by recording a vision (Location 972)
  • Visions are somewhat more spectacular and sensational than states of mind (Location 974)
  • Many attempts have been made to describe the feeling of salvation which the Buddhists call Nirvana and the Hindus call Moksha. (Location 977)
  • students of religion are often misled. (Location 979)
  • the doctrines of Christianity are different from those of Hinduism, it does not necessarily follow that the religions are different, for more than one doctrine may describe a single state of mind, (Location 979)
  • without this state of mind the religion, as a mere collection of doctrines, has no meaning whatever; (Location 981)
  • It is therefore most unwise to study religion from the standpoint of doctrine as doctrine, (Location 983)
  • Doctrines and conceptual ideas vary as languages vary, (Location 984)
  • the feeling of salvation. (Location 995)
  • the Hindu or Vedanta conception of Brahman, (Location 1000)
  • The ego is a device or trick (maya) (Location 1006)
  • Every dualism is exclusive; (Location 1021)
  • Brahman as the One Reality (Location 1021)
  • What, then, is nonduality in terms of a state of mind? (Location 1026)
  • the mind never contains more than one thought at a time; (Location 1031)
  • free to think (Location 1037)
  • serving God is just living; (Location 1042)
  • it is not a question of the way in which you live, because all ways are included in God. (Location 1042)
  • any kind of life is spiritual (Location 1049)
  • it makes the righteous man no nearer to salvation than the criminal (Location 1050)
  • In the spiritual world there is no top and bottom of the class; (Location 1052)
  • The only difference between sage or mystic and ordinary, unenlightened man is that the one realizes his identity with God or Brahman, whereas the other does not. (Location 1053)
  • But the lack of realization does not alter the fact. (Location 1054)
  • Beware of the false freedom of doing as you like; (Location 1056)
  • to be really free you must also be free to do as you don’t like, (Location 1057)
  • if you are only free to do as you like you are still tied up in dualism, (Location 1057)
  • being bound by your own whims. (Location 1058)
  • be free to be ignorant, (Location 1058)
  • freedom to be yourself, (Location 1059)
  • God is not what you have to become, but what you are— (Location 1060)
  • the unconscious has no specific boundaries. (Location 1077)
  • condition of being unaware of certain desires, impulses, tendencies, reactions, and fantasies (Location 1077)
  • when psychologists began to have the idea of the unconscious this was simply man’s fumbling rediscovery of the lost gods and demons. (Location 1118)
  • You have to come to terms with the gods before you can ignore them, (Location 1129)
  • exploring of the unknown self was the essential first step, (Location 1135)
  • Thoughts are often wolves in sheep’s clothing. (Location 1141)
  • You can follow the age-old techniques of meditation (Location 1147)
  • eternity is not just everlasting time; eternity is beyond time; it is now. (Location 1168)
  • our idea of time is spatial; it has length, which is a spatial dimension. But eternity has no length, and the nearest thing to it in our experience is what we call the present moment. It cannot be measured, but it is always here. (Location 1170)
  • the “far-off, divine event” is not just millions of years in the future: it is now. (Location 1172)
  • At this moment the universe is both manifested as a collection of separate individual things, and at the same time each of these things retains absolute unity and identity with its divine source. (Location 1173)
  • The object of Hindu, and for that matter of almost all Asian religion, is to awaken in man the realization of this unity and identity. In Hinduism this realization is called moksha or kaivalya, and in Buddhism Nirvana, and it is astonishing how seldom the West achieves any real understanding of what this condition of the spirit involves. (Location 1174)
  • At death he merges his individuality forever into infinitude unless he wishes to return again to the earth in order to teach dharma (the Law) to men. (Location 1186)
  • He is freed from himself, which is the only thing that ever bound anyone, because he has let himself go. (Location 1224)
  • The unenlightened man keeps a tight hold on himself because he is afraid of losing himself; he can trust neither circumstances nor his own human nature; he is terrified of being genuine, of accepting himself as he is and tries to deceive himself into the belief that he is as he wishes to be. (Location 1225)
  • But these are the wishes, the desires that bind him, and it was such desires as these that the Buddha described as the cause of human misery. (Location 1227)
  • People imagine that letting themselves go would have disastrous results; trusting neither circumstances nor themselves, which together make up life, they are forever interfering and trying to make their own souls and the world conform with preconceived patterns. (Location 1228)
  • This interference is simply the attempt of the ego to dominate life. (Location 1230)
  • In fact you have always had this freedom, for the state of union with Brahman can neither be attained nor lost; (Location 1232)
  • It can only be realized, (Location 1233)
  • “he that loseth his life shall find it.” (Location 1236)
  • In the quest for understanding of life there comes a time when everyone is confronted with “that little tail”—the one tiny obstacle that stands in the way of complete fulfillment. (Location 1242)
  • Philosophically this condition is known as infinite regression, and psychologically it is that mad, exasperating state that must always precede the final experience of awakening. (Location 1252)
  • the famous triangle puzzle of Mahayana philosophy. The two base points of this triangle represent the pairs of opposites which confront us at every moment of our experience—subject and object, I and you, positive and negative, something and nothing. (Location 1254)
  • to attain Enlightenment it is said that we must do away with selfish desire. (Location 1261)
  • there is only one Reality and that all diversity is illusion. (Location 1264)
  • we create the dualism of the Tao (Location 1270)
  • it. Dualism appears the moment we make an assertion or a denial about anything; as soon as we think that This is That or This is not That we have the distinction between This and That. (Location 1270)
  • you cannot by any means diverge from the Tao. (Location 1276)
  • You may love life or you may loathe it, yet your loving and loathing are themselves manifestations of life. (Location 1276)
  • to be enlightened we must live in the eternal. (Location 1278)
  • that infinitely small and therefore infinitely great point of time is called the present moment. (Location 1278)
  • The universe exists only in that moment, and it is said that the wise man moves with it, clinging neither to the past nor to the future, making his mind like the mirror that reflects everything instantly as it comes before it, yet making no effort to retain the reflection when the object is removed. (Location 1279)
  • mind as a mirror. (Location 1281)
  • we find that this is a description, not of what we should do, but of what we cannot help doing in any case. (Location 1282)
  • We cannot separate ourselves from this present moment, (Location 1284)
  • There is only one Reality! (Location 1287)
  • you can’t diverge from the Tao, for everything, anything, and nothing is Tao. (Location 1294)
  • “And who,” asked the cakeseller, “are the Immortals?” “They are those who do not depend on their own power to keep themselves alive. (Location 1309)
  • When they go about in pairs one of them is always invisible. (Location 1371)
  • “I see no man on the road at all, excepting yourself.” (Location 1376)
  • “His breathing is operated by the wind but you do not notice it; the light of his right and left eyes is given by the sun and moon, but you do not see it; his shouting is of the thunder, his whispering of the waves, and his laughter of the mountain streams, but you do not hear it; his flesh is maintained by the earth, and his bones and vital juices by the rocks and rains, but you do not understand it; his thoughts and moods are directed by the coming and going of the seasons and the elements, but you are not aware of it. He does not rely on his own resources; he allows himself to be maintained and directed by that which maintains and directs the wind, the sun, the moon, and the rivers, but you do not recognize it.” (Location 1382)
  • “Only you have the power to make him visible. There is a magic by which you can make him appear.” (Location 1388)
  • “The magic,” answered the trader, “is this: in spring to watch the young grass peeping out between the stones; in summer to lift an eye at the lazy clouds; in autumn to follow the leaves that dance in the wind; in winter to wake and find the tracks of birds in the snow. To rise at dawn and go to sleep at sunset; to eat rice three times in a day; to talk of buying and selling with one’s neighbors; to chew the seeds of water melon and to plait straw ropes around the toes.” (Location 1390)
    • Note: Be yourself
  • It also rejects the possibility of divine intervention at the causal end of the process, having no parallel to the Christian concept of Grace. In Christianity there is no human power that can, of its own resources, make for righteousness and salvation, for by reason of original sin it is impossible for man to move upwards without the gift of divine Grace. (Location 1403)
  • principle of absolute self-reliance. (Location 1409)
  • only in Mahayana has a way of salvation by faith arisen. (Location 1422)
  • Enlightenment (the Buddhist life-goal) consists of an inner realization of nonduality. All those things upon which unenlightened man depends for his happiness are dual, and thus conditioned by their opposites. Life cannot be had without death, pleasure without evil. We cannot, therefore, depend for our ultimate salvation and security upon any one aspect of a given pair of opposites (dvandva), for the two are as essential to each other as back and front are essential to the totality of any object. (Location 1427)
  • Nirvana is still an escape from Samsara, (Location 1443)
  • duality of Nirvana and Samsara. (Location 1445)
  • They are generally regarded as a mere degeneration of the creed, a pure concession to unregenerate human nature, which demands supernatural beings to achieve what men are too lazy and too frightened to achieve for themselves. (Location 1465)
  • salvation by faith would naturally appeal to them, (Location 1467)
  • what is done by one individual affects all others; if one man raises himself, he raises at the same time the whole universe. (Location 1485)
  • the Sukhavati-vyuha the possibility of self-help (Location 1489)
  • Buddhists who found that the rigid morality of monkhood, with its insistence on the negative precept, served only to aggravate the inner desire for vice. (Location 1500)
  • The first revolution was against the metaphysics, and this gave birth to the Chinese school of Ch’an (Japanese, Zen) (Location 1509)
  • discipline Zen remained essentially a way of self-help. (Location 1512)
  • All that is necessary is to give up forever any idea of attaining merit by one’s own power, and then to have faith that one is accepted by the compassion of Amida from the very beginning, no matter what one’s moral condition. (Location 1543)
  • One must even give up the idea that faith itself is achieved by self-power, for faith, too, is Amida’s gift. (Location 1545)
  • When we say that a man is a Buddha just as he is, what does this mean (Location 1570)
  • psychology? It means that he is divine or fundamentally acceptable just as he is, whether saint or sinner, sage or fool. (Location 1571)
  • All self-powered striving and contriving (hakarai) is set aside in the realization that Buddhahood can neither be attained nor got rid of because it alone is. (Location 1574)
  • in Mahayana nondualism, the Buddha principle, Tathata (Suchness), has no opposite and is the only Reality. (Location 1576)
  • dualism of self and other, man and Amida; (Location 1591)
  • one’s “ordinary thoughts” or “everyday mind” is Enlightenment (satori). (Location 1596)
  • You must not be artful. Be your ordinary self . . . You yourself as you are—that is Buddha Dharma. (Location 1597)
  • The truly religious man has nothing to do but go on with his life as he finds it in the various circumstances of this worldly existence. He rises quietly in the morning, puts on his dress and goes out to his work. When he wants to walk, he walks; when he wants to sit, he sits. He has no hankering after Buddhahood, not the remotest thought of it. (Location 1602)
  • If you strive after Buddhahood by any conscious contrivances, your Buddha is indeed the source of eternal transmigration. (Location 1605)
  • “If ordinary life is Nirvana and ordinary thoughts are Enlightenment, whatever is Buddhism about, and what can it possibly teach us, other than to go on living exactly as we have lived before?” (Location 1607)
  • Zen wants us to feel nonduality, not just to think it, (Location 1620)
  • free within ourselves, (Location 1622)
  • at home with ourselves and with the universe in which we live. (Location 1623)
  • This freedom is known when we give up “contriving” and accept ourselves as we are, but it does not seem to me that the experience can be effective unless there has first been a state of contriving and struggle. (Location 1623)
  • It is the discovery that to accord with the universe, to express the Tao, one has but to live, and when this is fully understood it becomes possible to live one’s life with a peculiar zest and abandon. (Location 1630)
  • let your mind go in whatever direction it pleases, (Location 1632)
  • freedom is that you can think any kind of thought, be any kind of person, and do any kind of thing without ever being able to depart from Amida’s all-embracing love and generosity. (Location 1637)
  • nonduality is beyond good and evil, (Location 1647)
  • Some day each and every one will be influenced by the wisdom and love (Location 1655)
  • experience itself and the thing experienced (Tathata) is nondual and beyond good and evil, (Location 1669)
  • We use God, if we may dare to say so, whenever we make an act of our will, and when we proceed to execute a purpose. He has not merely given us clearness of head, tenderness of heart, and strength of limb, as gifts which we may use independently of Him when once He has conferred them upon us. But He distinctly permits and actually concurs with every use of them in thinking, loving or acting. (Location 1683)
  • Enlightenment is no Enlightenment unless it is shared and circulated. (Location 1708)
  • It is no one’s property, and those who try to possess it for themselves do not understand it. (Location 1708)
  • people spend so much energy looking for the God that they fail to see the activity, (Location 1737)
  • The rivers flow; the flowers bloom; you walk down the street. (Location 1738)
  • He always thinks of the second and third pieces of cake while he is eating the first, and thus is never satisfied with any of them, (Location 1744)
  • This is called the vicious circle of having lunch for breakfast, or living for your future. But tomorrow never comes. (Location 1745)
  • if anyone watches it in order to see God he will surely be disappointed. (Location 1747)
  • The idea of God is a finger pointing the way to Reality, but when people try to join God and Reality, to identify the one with the other, to find the former in the latter, they are trying to join together two things that were never in need of being joined. (Location 1749)
  • Take it easy for a while; just watch the snow falling or the kettle boiling, and not so much hurry. (Location 1754)
  • he has Enlightenment without knowing it, and cannot appreciate his good fortune. (Location 1756)
  • Yet he, too, is a so-whatter, for he asks “So what?” (Location 1757)
  • PEOPLE OFTEN SAY THAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR Reality and that they are trying to live. I wonder what that means? (Location 1774)
  • it is asked whether Tao means Life in the sense of simple existence, or whether Tao is Life lived in a special way, lived faithfully, thoroughly, vitally and with a certain zest born of the joy of being alive. (Location 1783)
  • “If you try to accord with it,” said the teacher, “you will get away from it.” (Location 1788)
  • we have all met those who are trying very hard to be real persons, to give their lives Reality (or meaning) and to live as distinct from existing. (Location 1789)
  • those who try to make themselves great become small. (Location 1793)
  • So many modern religions and psychologies make this fundamental mistake of trying to make the tail wag the dog, which is what the quest for personality amounts to. (Location 1796)
  • For Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars. (Location 1809)
  • Scientific rationalism may alter the surface, may clothe the spirit in a different garment, may make it act another part. But the result is only acting, a pretence, an outward show, against which the inner being rebels and brings to pass those severe mental conflicts which estrange man from life. (Location 1819)
  • water is the symbol of matter, which, in union with spirit, produces the world of form. (Location 1844)
  • Ignorance and spiritual darkness is the result of being involved in a dualism, (Location 1849)
  • this isolation of the self from life, can only produce misery and spiritual death. (Location 1856)
  • Apart from life, the self is as meaningless as a solitary note taken from a symphony, (Location 1856)
  • between these two opposites, the self and the universe, there may be a union— (Location 1862)
  • “To him who knows nothing of Buddhism, mountains are mountains, waters are waters, and trees are trees. When he has read the scriptures and understood a little of the doctrine, mountains are to him no longer mountains, waters no longer waters, and trees no longer trees. But when he is thoroughly enlightened, then mountains are once again mountains, waters waters, and trees trees.” (Location 1865)
  • the mighty whole and the degraded part. (Location 1874)
  • joy is unknown without sorrow, life without death, pleasure without pain. (Location 1878)
  • variety in things, (Location 1884)
  • meaning itself, it cannot be described; it can only be experienced, (Location 1892)