Proverbs

If you cannot hear the sound of grass growing, you are not yet quiet enough. Sit until you hear it, and you will not be tempted to mistake your speech for teaching.

Sitting silently, the mind illumines without reaching. Illuminating without reaching, the world arises in the silence — not added on, not pushed away.

Samādhi without prajñā becomes dullness; prajñā without samādhi becomes scattering. Hold them as two wings of one bird, and the bird neither falls into stupor nor blows away in the wind.

I gathered capping phrases as a forester gathers cuttings — not because the trees needed gathering, but so that students who could not climb would still hear the wind in the branches.

I have built a grass hut in which there is nothing of value. After eating, I'm ready for a nap. When the world looks for me, I'm not here — though I never went anywhere.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing—not even waiting.

Without thinking good or evil, what is your original face — the face you had before your father and mother were born?

A monk asked: when cold and heat come, how can we escape them? Why not go to a place where there is no cold and no heat? Where is such a place? Where the cold kills you, the heat kills you.

Silence is not the absence of sound; it is the place from which sounds arise. Return to it through the day, and the day stops being a chain of noises.

Bow deep, stand slow. The bow is not for me; it is for the body to remember that the floor exists. The slow standing is not for show; it is for the body to remember that the air exists.

Faith is not belief in a thing; faith is the willingness to keep sitting when the belief in sitting has gone. The dharma waits for the second kind.

Mazu studied with me for eight years before I asked him a single question. The answer that came was already an old answer when it came. The eight years had not been spent on a question — they had been spent on the mouth.