Essays in Zen Buddhism

No amount of wordy explanations will ever lead us into the nature of our own selves. The more you explain, the further it runs away

Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream. If

Zen has its own way of pointing to the nature of one’s own being, and that when this is done one attains to Buddhahood, in which all the contradictions and disturbances caused by the intellect are entirely harmonized in a unity of higher order.

This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies. When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away or is warped and expresses itself abnormally. It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled.

They all missed apprehending the great fact of life itself, which flows altogether outside of these vain exercises of the intellect or of the imagination.