Huangbo Xiyun Quotes

People believe I am what they see Me as, rather than what they do not see. But I am the Great Unseen, not what I cause Myself to be in any particular moment. In a sense, I am what I am not. It is from the Am-notness that I come, and to it I always return.

A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.

That which is cannot be true.

Yet, the Universe is real enough to the conscious beings in it, which are as unreal as it is itself.

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

The truth is a snare: you cannot have it, without being caught. You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.

From a distance it is something; and nearby it is nothing.

I believe in everything. I believe that everything is an illusion, and everything is there to be believed in.

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do you think we can go on like this forever?

Maybe Santa Claus is real. Here's the problem: reality.

I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.

The light was only just visible - except of course that there was no one to see, no witnesses, not this time, but it was nevertheless a light.

...it's just as bad to live in a place where what you do see isn't there as it is to live in one where what you don't see is.

Between living and dreaming there is a third thing. Guess it.

But if they don't exist, how can a man see them?

It is easier to argue that something nobody believes in actually exists than it is to argue that something everybody believes in is unreal.

Truth ... Is a breath, a wind, A shadow, a phantom; Long have I pursued it, But never have I touched The hem of its garment.

Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.

Everything is illusion. Even that last sentence.

A thing either is what it appears to be; or it is not, but yet appears to be; or it is, but does not appear to be; or it is not, and does not appear to be.

I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want somebody else to be and then people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is nothing like that.

Let us affirm what seems to be the truth, that, whether one is or is not, one and the others in relation to themselves and one another, all of them, in every way, are and are not, and appear to be and appear not to be.

In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.

The problem is we think we exist.