The present perception is the Truth, but the Truth is beyond this perception.

Only if you can forget the words and embody the meaning will you (have)... the ability to kill people's false selves and conditioned perceptions

things themselves are the true self and the true self itself is things

If where you stand is reality, then your actions have power... it is there, pure and naked and full of life.

All those who would communicate the message of the source must be able to kill a person's false personality without blinking an eye

What is important is to respect the root and extend it to the branches... Those who realize transcendence pass through words and phrases and make them come to life.

the Path is right where you stand... why would you need to search the pages for someone else's dead words?

When there is continuous awareness from mind-moment to mind-moment you will naturally meet the Source on all sides.

Once you discover the original, inherently complete and real mind, no matter what situation you meet, you will understand completely.

experience the absence of conditioned mind and observe that all phenomena are like dreams… enter into the uncontrived, uncluttered ocean of true nature.

Intellectually brilliant but shallow… they increase the thorns of arbitrary opinion as they show off their ability and understanding… a great pity!

Here is the unsophisticated Self—your original face. Here is the landscape of your birthplace—bare and beautiful.

All you teeming multitudes, listen to my words! It is not that I, the little child, would dare to act in a disorderly way. But this ruler of the Miao, with his unyielding ways, deserves Heaven's punishment.

What a strange feeling to realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone jotting down at random without order or purpose whatever nonsensical, trifling thoughts have passed through my mind. What a demented and crazy thing to do!

The beauty of life is in its impermanence. If we lived forever, if the dews of Adashino never vanished, if the crematory smoke on Toribeyama never faded, men would hardly feel the pity of things.

It is a world full of lies, and we shall make no mistake if we make up our minds that what we hear is really not at all strange and unusual but merely exaggerated in the telling.

To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations—such is a pleasure beyond compare.

Looking back on months and years of intimacy, to feel that your friend, while you still remember the moving words you exchanged, is yet growing distant and living in a world apart—all this is sadder far than partings brought by death.

It is a great error to act superior to others.... anyone truly versed in any art will be clearly aware of his own deficiency; and therefore, his ambition being never satisfied, he ends by never being proud.

It is only after the silk wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller, that a scroll looks beautiful.