Zen Rocks

  At the opening of his new temple Zen Master Dogen (the founder of Soto Zen in Japan) was asked what he had discovered during his training in China, he replied "I learnt that my eyes are horizontal and my nose is vertical. I return to Japan without a single sutra. So I have no Buddhism."

To study the Way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things.
To be enlightened by all things is to remove
the barriers between oneself and others.
Sobogenzo Genjo Koan.

Time flies quicker than an arrow and life passes with greater transience than the dew. However skillful you may be, how can you ever recall a single day of the past? Should you live for a hundred years just wasting your time, every day will be filled with sorrow; should you drift as the slave of your senses for a hundred years and, yet, live truly for only so much as a single day you will in that one day not only live a hundred years of life but also a hundred years of your future life.
From the Shushogi

   The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely for then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish. All you have to do is realise that birth and death, as such, should not be avoided and then they will cease to exist for then, if you can understand that birth and death are Nirvana itself, there is not only no necessity to avoid them but also nothing to search for that is called Nirvana. The understanding of the above breaks the chains that bind one to birth and death therefore this problem, which is the greatest in Buddhism, must be completely understood.
The introduction to the Shushogi.

To practice the Buddha Way single-heartedly is, in itself, enlightenment.
There is no gap between practice and enlightenment, or meditation and daily life.

Once when the Zen Master Dogen was asked "what is Zen?". He replied, "If you build a fence around it there will be nothing inside".