Life is a groundless ground: no sooner does it appear, than it disappears, only to renew itself, then immediately break up and vanish again. It pours forth endlessly, like the river of Heraclitus into which one cannot step twice. If you try to grasp it, it slips away between your fingers.

One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This is not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be.

Gotama did for the self what Copernicus did for the earth: he put it in its rightful place, despite its continuing to appear just as it did before.Gotama no more rejected the existence of the self than Copernicus rejected the existence of the earth. Instead, rather than regarding it as a fixed, non-contingent point around which everything else turned, he recognized that each self was a fluid, contingent process just like everything else.

Mindful awareness is not presented as a passive concentration on a single, steady object, but as a refined engagement with a shifting, complex world. Mindfulness is a skill that can be developed. It is a choice, an act, a response that springs from a quiet but curious intelligence. And it is empathetic, keenly sensitized to the peculiar texture of one’s own and others’ suffering.

I was more concerned with refining my sense of the sheer mysteriousness of life so that it infused each moment of my waking existence, thereby serving as a ground from which to respond more openly and vitally to whatever occurred.

For me, Buddhism is like a living organism. If it is to flourish outside self-enclosed ghettos of believers, it will have to meet the challenge of understanding, interacting with, and adapting to an environment that is strikingly different from those in which it has evolved.

By emphasizing doubt rather than belief, perplexity rather than certainty, and questions rather than answers, Zen practice granted me the freedom to imagine.

Much of what animated me in those days I now recognize as the romantic yearnings of an idealistic, alienated, and aimless young man. I endowed these strange, exotic people, about whom I knew little, with all the virtues that my own culture seemed to lack.

We should not allow ourselves to be deceived by our outward show of ‘civilized’ manners and ‘cultured’ social behavior into believing that self-concern, desirous attachment, aversion, and indifference are steadily losing their hold over us.