9. To you who would like to slap your boss with a letter of resignation

As a human being, you can walk freely in any direction you choose.
**
As a human being, whatever you do, you should do it in a way that can’t be repeated a second time. What can be repeated is best left to the robots.
**
Life doesn’t run on tracks.
**
Birds don’t sing in major or minor. Bodhidharma’s teaching doesn’t fit on lined paper.
The buddha-dharma is wide and unlimited. When you try to hold it still, you’ve missed it. It isn’t dried cod, but a live fish. Living fish have no fixed form.
**
In the soldier’s handbook it says that in war you must be prepared for a thousand different possibilities. That doesn’t just go for war – there’s no rule book for life either. When you try to live your life according to a manual, you’re sure to fail.
For a court case as well, it goes without saying that you have to be on your guard when everything runs according to the book.
**
The wild geese leave no traces,
yet no matter where they fly, they never lose their way.
There are no footprints on the way of the bird. It’s not the same as a steam engine that runs on tracks or an ox’s well-worn path.
**
Don’t we live life from moment to moment? How could we possibly take life, analyze it, systematize it and file it away?
**
The sad thing about people is that they can’t stray even a single step away from their habits.
**
Those who do things according to the book are failures.
**
We constantly let ourselves be distracted by details, and in this way we lose sight of the whole.
We buy strange things that we don’t want at all in the hope that we just might win something with the lottery ticket the cashier gives us for free.
**
Actually, “studying” means gaining insight into life.
Since the Meiji Period, however, it’s turned into a matter of getting a qualification for professional life.
**
However much you accomplish in this life, you can’t present any of it at the last judgement. You will die naked.
**
In the world, isn’t what we call good or bad, true or false, more or less the same thing?
**
When the Hōjō clan stormed Kusunoki Masashige’s Chihaya-castle, even on the Hōjō side, some soldiers died. They called it a “glorious death”. That’s why there are poems like the following:
When you’re ready, even for fame and glory, to throw away your life,
How can you hesitate to sacrifice it for the dharma?
**
In the end, there will be nothing left for you to do besides let go.
**
You’ve got to stand on solid feet, no matter what direction the wind might blow.
**
Isn’t it evident that the greatest happiness consists in doing what you have to do?
**
Not wasting your time in life means sitting stably in the right place at the right time – not missing the precise moment.
**
Your life shouldn’t be just one defeat after the other, constantly on the run until your last hideout is found.
“I’m a man of leisure who has made the whole universe his own.” [Daichi Zenji] That’s quite another way to live.
**
“Now I’ve reached the point where I can finally leave the world behind me!”
This realization is the cause that enables you to leave home and become a monk. It enables you to do zazen.
**
You can’t depend on anything. The value of things changes. This insight is what motivated Shakyamuni to renounce his King’s title, to leave his wife and son and become a monk.

9. To you who would like to slap your boss with a letter of resignation

As a human being, you can walk freely in any direction you choose.
**
As a human being, whatever you do, you should do it in a way that can’t be repeated a second time. What can be repeated is best left to the robots.
**
Life doesn’t run on tracks.
**
Birds don’t sing in major or minor. Bodhidharma’s teaching doesn’t fit on lined paper.
The buddha-dharma is wide and unlimited. When you try to hold it still, you’ve missed it. It isn’t dried cod, but a live fish. Living fish have no fixed form.
**
In the soldier’s handbook it says that in war you must be prepared for a thousand different possibilities. That doesn’t just go for war – there’s no rule book for life either. When you try to live your life according to a manual, you’re sure to fail.
For a court case as well, it goes without saying that you have to be on your guard when everything runs according to the book.
**
The wild geese leave no traces,
yet no matter where they fly, they never lose their way.
There are no footprints on the way of the bird. It’s not the same as a steam engine that runs on tracks or an ox’s well-worn path.
**
Don’t we live life from moment to moment? How could we possibly take life, analyze it, systematize it and file it away?
**
The sad thing about people is that they can’t stray even a single step away from their habits.
**
Those who do things according to the book are failures.
**
We constantly let ourselves be distracted by details, and in this way we lose sight of the whole.
We buy strange things that we don’t want at all in the hope that we just might win something with the lottery ticket the cashier gives us for free.
**
Actually, “studying” means gaining insight into life.
Since the Meiji Period, however, it’s turned into a matter of getting a qualification for professional life.
**
However much you accomplish in this life, you can’t present any of it at the last judgement. You will die naked.
**
In the world, isn’t what we call good or bad, true or false, more or less the same thing?
**
When the Hōjō clan stormed Kusunoki Masashige’s Chihaya-castle, even on the Hōjō side, some soldiers died. They called it a “glorious death”. That’s why there are poems like the following:
When you’re ready, even for fame and glory, to throw away your life,
How can you hesitate to sacrifice it for the dharma?
**
In the end, there will be nothing left for you to do besides let go.
**
You’ve got to stand on solid feet, no matter what direction the wind might blow.
**
Isn’t it evident that the greatest happiness consists in doing what you have to do?
**
Not wasting your time in life means sitting stably in the right place at the right time – not missing the precise moment.
**
Your life shouldn’t be just one defeat after the other, constantly on the run until your last hideout is found.
“I’m a man of leisure who has made the whole universe his own.” [Daichi Zenji] That’s quite another way to live.
**
“Now I’ve reached the point where I can finally leave the world behind me!”
This realization is the cause that enables you to leave home and become a monk. It enables you to do zazen.
**
You can’t depend on anything. The value of things changes. This insight is what motivated Shakyamuni to renounce his King’s title, to leave his wife and son and become a monk.

21. To you who would like more money, love, status and fame

Heaven and earth give, air gives, water gives, plants give, animals give, humans give. All things give of themselves to each other.
It’s only within this reciprocal giving that we can survive – regardless of whether we’re thankful for it or not.
**
There’s nothing we need to complain about.
**
Nobody was granted life due to their personal merit. And no one can live just by using their own strength. But nonetheless, we’re all still only concerned with our own pocketbook.
**
Stupidity means being preoccupied with your own body.
Wisdom says, “I am what I am, no matter how things end up.”
A person outside of the Way is someone who only thinks of gain and loss. A devil is someone who makes a profit off of this.
**
What a bore: making a long face and complaining about having no money, nothing to eat, and being stuck in debt. It’s only because you believe that you have the right to revel in life and always feel good that you moan and groan about your poverty.
**
Once during the war, I visited a coal mine. With the same outfit and head-lamp as the miners, I got into the lift and down we went. At one point when we were going down it seemed to me as if suddenly we were going up again. But when I looked with the lamp at the wall of the shaft, I saw that we were still going down. In the beginning when we were accelerating downwards, we could really feel that we were going downwards. Just when the velocity changed it seemed to us as if we were going up again.
In exactly the same way, when we think about our lives, we always go wrong when we mistake the fluctuating amounts for the sum.
**
Saying you’ve had satori is just an interpretation of changing circumstances, as is saying you’re lost in illusion. Saying “good” is an interpretation of change, saying “bad” is another. “Rich” is an interpretation, “poor” another.
**
It’s self-evident that a poor man suffers less from his poverty than someone who was rich until a moment ago.
**
Illusion means not being able to recognize the seriousness of the situation.
**
Although you’re really not so hungry, you say you’ve got nothing to eat. And that alone makes you hungry. Words make for nightmares. Everyone makes a big deal over words.
**
I taught my parrot to say, “I’m doing fine!” One day the lamp fell and everything caught fire. Flapping his wings furiously, my parrot cried out his last words, “I’m doing fine, I’m doing fine!” – and died.
**
We’re constantly being misled by our own body and mind, and we don’t even realize it.
**
In the impermanent world we try to get forward with our name wherever we can. Yet aren’t we all born naked? Only afterwards did we get our name, our jumpers and our nipple. Once we’re big, we suddenly appeal to our importance, strength, intelligence or wealth just to make a name for ourselves. And all along we’re only naked.
**
What we construct as “the world” is nothing more than a mirage in the desert or a palace made out of ice. At another time, in another place, it would all melt away.
**
Hell-dwellers, hungry ghosts, animals, fighting demons, humans and heavenly beings: the inhabitants of all of these six worlds are where they are according to the measure of their blood congestion. When the blood congestion sinks, that’s buddha.
**
Good and bad karma from the past appears in this moment as karmic perception. As we all observe the world through this karmic perception, it seems to us like a demon’s world, like an animal world, like a hellish world. But we’re looking at one and the same thing.
**
Everybody sleeps in the bed of buddha nature and only dreams their illusion.
**
Amithaba Buddha says, “Everything is good as it is. There isn’t a single lost being. There’s no reason to get excited.” But the lost beings cry out, “No! That’s not how it is!”
**
Having the mind of the Way means forgetting yourself for the others. Forgetting the others for yourself means not having the mind of the way.
**
Losing is satori.
Winning is illusion.
**
The difference between yourself and the others disappears only when you completely give yourself up for the others. That’s what it means to save the others before you yourself are saved.
**
Not coveting a single thing is the greatest gift you can give to the universe.
**
The world in which everything is given without having to ask for it offers a perspective which is cool and clear, wide and unlimited – completely different from the perspective in the world of “every man for himself”.
**
The reason why buddha takes on so many different forms is because, out of compassion, he cries tears of so many different forms.
**
Buddha’s compassion is different from mere “pity”. His compassion provides a perch from which we cannot fall, no matter how we may stumble.
**
Big mind means buddha mind. It means living 24 hours a day without grabbing onto a single thing. It means not hanging onto the conventions of the world.