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“While you are continuing this practice, week after week, year after year, your experience will become deeper and deeper, and your experience will cover everything you do in your everyday life. The most important thing is to forget all gain
ing ideas, all dualistic ideas. In other words, just practice zazen in a certain posture. Do not think about anything. Just remain on your cushion without expecting anything. Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“In zazen, leave your front door and your back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don't serve them tea.”
― Shunryu Suzuki

“Keeping the precepts and observing pure moral conduct is the habit of Buddhists. But even those who haven’t formally received the precepts or have broken them can benefit from doing zazen.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Zazen is a physical practice as much as it a mental one.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“When I teach zazen I often tell people that it’s kind of like a yoga class where there is only one posture and you hold it for a very long time.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“A quiet room is best for zazen. We shouldn’t eat or drink too much, or too little. Put aside everything else. Don’t think of good or bad. Don’t judge your practice. Stop ruminating and deliberating about stuff. Don’t try to become a Buddha.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“People always get worried about whether they’re doing zazen right. But basically if you’re doing it at all, you’re probably doing it right �� even if your thoughts won’t stop, even if you’re sleepy or irritable, even if it just feels boring.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“One funny thing about zazen is that, unlike most other forms of meditation, we keep our eyes open. This is a way of acknowledging the outside world as part of our practice and as a part of us. If we close our eyes and shut out the outside world, we get a little unbalanced. We can start to believe that what we are is limited to that which is enveloped in what Dōgen likes to call our “skin bag.�� Or, conversely, the lack of visual input leads us deeper into the world of our own fantasies and abstractions. By opening our eyes, we are letting in that light that Dōgen says we should shine inward. So although we are shining our light inward, we also accept that there is no hard line that divides ourselves from the outside world, or the rest of the universe.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“Although zazen is certainly not all there is to Zen, a Zen which lacks zazen may be said to be no Zen at all.”
― Koji Sato, The Zen Life

“Zazen is by no means a "quick fix" panacea for all psychological ailments. While it does aim to uproot the core causes of our "normal" human spiritual dis-ease, any "abnormal" mental health issues should be addressed before one is ready to engage in the austere rigors of this spiritual discipline.”
― Bret W Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism

“Our society has largely forgotten the importance of bodily posture for alertness, for digestion, and most importantly for one's psychophysical disposition. Zazen reminds the body, as well as the mind, of the beneficial effects of good posture. Moreover, zazen increases physical as well as mental flexibility, and in general it attunes our minds to the needs of the body, allowing the body to mindfully retune itself.”
― Bret W Davis, Zen Pathways: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Practice of Zen Buddhism

“Try always to keep the right posture, not only when you practice zazen, but in all your activities.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

“To be aware of the meaning of your life, you practice zazen.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“A frog is very interesting. He sits like us, too, you know. But he does not think that he is doing anything so special. When you go to a zendo and sit, you may think you are doing some special thing. While your husband or wife is sleeping, you are practicing zazen! You are doing some special thing, and your spouse is lazy! That may be your understanding of zazen. But look at the frog. A frog also sits like us, but he has no idea of zazen. Watch him. If something annoys him, he will make a face. If something comes along to eat, he will snap it up and eat, and he eats sitting. Actually that is our zazen—not any special thing.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice

“To practice zazen, Suzuki-roshi often reminded his students, is to study the self. By 1983, the senior priests at Zen Center had logged a lot of hours in the study hall. The work and meditation schedule they kept was famous for its rigor. Typically, they sat for almost two hours every morning, beginning at five, attended a midday service, and sat again for an hour or two in the evening until nine. During the two annual Practice Periods, the daily meditation periods were extended. Once a month, they sat for twelve or fourteen hours—a one-day sesshin (intensive retreat). At the end of each Practice Period, they sat a seven day sesshin—twelve to fourteen hours a day for seven straight days, during which they took their meager meals in the zendo, and slept on their cushions. In fifteen years, Reb, Yvonne, Lew, and the other senior students who'd kept the daily schedule had each sat zazen for at least 10,000 to 15,000 hours.

And yet, by any common-sense standard, the most seasoned meditators at Zen Center repeatedly flunked simple tests of self-awareness. "I wonder," wrote a former Zen Center student in a letter to Yvonne in 1987, "if in some cases doing zazen doesn't augment or aggravate the dissociative process—as if in some way it cauterizes the personality and seals it off, encapsulates it, widens the breach between heart and mind.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“Just sitting, transcending good or evil, satori or delusion, is the zazen that transcends the sage and the ordinary man.”
― Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice

“Mindful of the passing of time, engage yourself in zazen as though saving your head from fire.”
― ��ō�����, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master

“Zazen is not learning to do concentration. It is the dharma gate of great ease and joy. It is undivided practice-realization.”
― ��ō�����, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master

“[Question:] Should zazen be practiced by laymen and lay-women, or should it be practiced by home leavers alone?

[Dogen's answer:] The ancestors say, "In understanding buddha dharma, men and women, noble and common people are not distinguished.”
― ��ō�����, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master

“When we have difficulties, we might start to practice zazen to find a way out. Some people seek worldly success with meditation, using it as training in concentration, spontaneity, or bravery. Others aspire to be released from everyday life by some kind of enlightenment experience. Either way, we search because we feel a lack.

When we practice zazen with this attitude, what happens in our minds is the same as when we struggle for fame and profit. As long as we practice zazen with seeking mind, we create samsara within our practice.”
― Shohaku Okumura, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Zazen should not be defiled by our desires—even the desire for enlightenment or becoming a buddha.”
― Shohaku Okumura, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Even if we don't become an expert—always prepared, refined, and elegant like a veteran swordsman, virtuoso Noh actor, or tea master—we're fine, aren't we? What's wrong with toddling and limping along the path of life practicing zazen?”
― Kosho Uchiyama, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Because I practiced good-for-nothing zazen with devotion, I felt my life was justified. Yet this intensity of practice was possible only when I was young, strong, and healthy. In this way I discovered arrogance in a deep layer of my mind.”
― Shohaku Okumura, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Just sitting, which is good for nothing, is the ultimate posture of freedom from greed.”
― Shohaku Okumura, The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo

“Thirty minutes of sharp, alert sitting is far more beneficial than an hour of sleepy, dull zazen.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

“Many people wonder about the optimal length for a period of zazen. Sitting a short period of time is by no means less effective than a longer period. Zazen has worth and merit in itself, no matter how long one sits. Sitting from morning to night is not necessarily the best meditation. If you sit for a short period of time, you receive benefit from that sitting, and if you sit for a long period of time, you also benefit.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

“Beginners who sit on their own should start with periods of five minutes and gradually work up to about twenty-five or thirty minutes for a single sitting.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

“The ideal number of sitting periods in a day will depend on individual aspiration and circumstances. If we decide that one of our periods of sitting will be thirty minutes, then sitting four periods of zazen in a day would already amount to two hours. At the very least, everyone should be able to make time for one period each day, and most people should be able to sit at least two, for a total of an hour a day. People with high aspirations should be able to sit three or four periods a day, although maintaining such a schedule every day is hardly easy.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

“Practice as many periods a day as is reasonable given your aspiration and circumstances, and make sure you faithfully stick to your schedule every day. Say you are sitting three periods a day. What is the best time to do so? This will also depend on circumstances. The ideal scenario would be to sit one period after rising and getting dressed, one period during the day, and one period before going to bed. Those who work full time may find it impossible to sit a period of meditation during the day, in which case they could incorporate that time as part of their morning or evening sit. Once again, the important thing is to practice as much as your circumstances allow.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate

“Suppose we have a bucket filled with dirty water and pour a glass of clean water into it. Although we will see no difference when we look at it, the addition of that glass of water has made the water in the bucket that much cleaner. Likewise, when we sit for even a single period of zazen our personality becomes purified in proportion to the length of that sitting. Although we may not be the least aware of it, we can be certain we have moved a step closer to the realization of our essential nature.”
― Kōun Yamada, Zen: The Authentic Gate