Everyone is originally pure, not in the slightest way different from the Buddha. Zazen is the purity of one’s own nature through the body. So the self of zazen is different from the self of ordinary life. With the ordinary self you are always using your mind to figure out: how to get through this world, how to make life easier, how to make it more pleasurable, [to know] what is delicious and what is tasteless. Zazen puts all that aside. In other words, it takes a break from the human world. What is the human world? The five desires and the six dusts. Wanting money, wanting to eat tasty food, and wanting things to be easy. [People] spend their whole lives [seeking] sex, food, position and the likes. In zazen, however, you let go of all relationships, take a pause from everything, stop thinking in terms of good and bad, stop judging right from wrong. You stop the movement of consciousness, refrain from calculation of ideas. You don’t seek to be a Buddha because that too is a desire.

Sawaki Kôdô on Zazen (Zenshû [Collected Works] vol. 15 p. 161)