the medicine of the discipline becomes a diet, the cure an addiction, and the raft a houseboat... liberation turns into just another social institution and dies of respectability

If science is to become our way of liberation, its theoretical view must be translated into feeling... Western science must have its own yoga, and some outgrowth of psychotherapy is the natural candidate

The ego is in every sense a story… To identify with the ego is to confuse the organism with its history, to make its guiding principle a narrowly selected and incomplete record… and therefore liberation from the ego is synonymous with the full acceptance of death.

As the Chinese Taoists have seen, there is really no alternative to trusting man's nature. It is the most practical of practical politics.

LIfe is not a problem so why are you asking for a solution? The real problem is believing that the question makes sense.

There is no knowledge except knowledge of the present, there is no observer separate from the flow of events and as a result, the sense of self shifts from an independent observer to everything that is observed.

There is absolutely no point in clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick if it is just that they may live to be naked, hungry, and sick again, or live merely to be able to do the same for others.

Respect ethical tradition not because is is sacrosanct but because it is the only way of being in communication with others.

If there is anything to be learned from history, it is that scoldings, warnings, and preachings are a complete ethical failure... they only confirm and ingrain the attitudes which keep us at war.

Psychotherapy and liberation are completed in the moment when shame and guilt collapse, when the organism is no longer compelled to defend itself for being an oganism.

The high art of a true Bodhisattva is possible only for him who has gone beyond all need for self-justification, for so long as there is something to prove, some ax to grind, there is no dance.

We have 16th century personalities in the world of 20th century concepts because social conventions lag far behind the flight of theoretical knowledge.

Tao is not pursuing any purpose, and therefore is not meeting any difficulty.

symptoms... say, anxiety, migraine, depression, alcoholism, phobia, or lethargy enable the person to control others without accepting responsibility for doing so.

one is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious

When looking at the external world as a mirror, we may exclaim with amazement, 'Why, that's me!'

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

one of the most precious gifts of Asia to the world, the origins of Zen are as much Taoist as Buddhist... a way and a view of life which does not belong to any of the formal categories of modern Western thought... Zen may be regarded as the fulfillment of long traditions of Indian and Chinese culture

Confucianism preoccupies itself with conventional knowledge... presides over the socially necessary task of forcing the original spontaneity of life into the rigid rules of convention...The individual defines himself and his place in society in terms of the Confucian formulae... a task that involves not only conflict and pain, but also the loss of that peculiar naturalness and un-self-consciousness for which little children are so much loved, and which is sometimes regained by saints and sages.

it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it