Emptiness the starting point. — In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.
Dialogue can be a very dangerous pastime, for it may force us to give up some of our most cherished caricatures—and these die hard.
I put away that stuffed God I had all stitched up with my human understandings and fears. God is less formulaic and quantifiable as he once used to be, but experiencing the reality of his love is infinitely better than dragging that other one around.
Abandon wisdom, discard knowledge, and people will benefit a hundredfold.
If you want to study Zen, you should forget all your previous ideas and just practice zazen and see what kind of experience you have in your practice. That is naturalness.
we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.
You can’t have your daughter as long as you have a concept of her. When you get rid of the concept, you meet your daughter for the first time. That’s the way this works.
The first act of insight is throw away the labels.
For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.
In order for this to happen, your entire frame of reference will have to change, and you will be forced to surrender many things that you now scarcely know you have.
