"'No gaining, no knowing' is the attitude of refraining from all fabrication. In other words, it means to be free from the ideas we make up in our head. I call this opening the hand of thought.
"When we think of something, we grasp it with our minds. If we open the hand of thought, it drops away. This is Dōgen Zenji's famous phrase shinjin datsuraki ('dropping off body and mind').
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"[T]he more we practice opening the hand of thought, the clearer it becomes to us that 'self' is not the same as 'thought.' We come to see decisively that the true self is not something made up in our heads. True self is the self of everything, the self of the whole dharma world, the original self that is manifest when we let go of thought.
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"To spend your life being blinded and dragged around by your own desires is a pathetic thing. However you live, what you do with your life depends on you. With that understanding, just sit silently for ten years, then for another ten, and after that, for ten more years.
Kōsho Uchiyama
Opening The Hand of Thought
Along with Dainin Katagiri's Each Moment Is the Universe: Zen and the Way of Being Time, maybe what i currently consider the two best explanations of what Zen is really all about.
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