Zen and Zen Classics volume 1

Eastern enlightenment is the full and perfect understanding that the stupidity, vulgarity, and hypocrisy of this world is quite all right just at it is.

Zen has no gratitude, but at the same time it has no pride.

Why? Because folly is wisdom, and salvation is damnation. We must avoid enlightenment like the plague, and do zazen to keep our minds in a constant confusion like that of nature, and be madly attached to infinite trifles.

Since language, like all other human inventions, is dichotomous, the only way to speak about Zen is to be silent, but this kind of silence is also relative, relative to speaking. Also, we can avoid relativity to some extent by speaking imperatively or subjunctively instead of indicatively. In any case, negations are not allowed, and affirmations only when they do not imply the negation of a negation.

There is no bad; all things are good; some are better.

Any poem is too long to express Zen, yet on the other hand, length is no obstacle to Zen, so that what is wrong is not that it consists of two hundred and seventy lines of seven characters each, but that Yungchia keeps talking when he has nothing more to say; that he is enjoying himself, not thinking of the reader too.

Worry is the great enemy. The search for enlightenment obscures and delays it. What is wrong is not the pain and grief suffering, but thinking about ourselves as sufferers.

Limits and boundaries are man-made things, and what man has put together, man can put asunder.

Here and there are dualities and therefore obstructions to the life of perfection. Infinity is under our noses, our noses are infinitely long.

It is only a question of becoming aware of our true condition, and this becoming aware is called "entering".