Dogen Zenji Quotes

You should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this.

I'm always soul searching on a spiritual level.

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

Meditation is not a withdrawal from life. Meditation is a process of understanding oneself.

Gently resist the temptation to chase your dreams into the world; pursue them in your heart until they disappear into the Self, and leave them there.

Strive to close the eyes of the body and open those of the soul and look into your own heart.

The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves. That is why we have teaching. But the teaching is not ourselves. It is some explanation of ourselves. To study the teaching is to know yourselves. That is why we do not ever attach to the teaching, or to the teacher. The moment you meet a teacher you should leave the teacher, and you should be independent. You want a teacher so that you can be independent. So you study yourselves. You have the teacher for yourselves, not for the teacher.

Meditation is my soul's soundless conversation with my inner pilot.

Meditate on the Word in the Word.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

Practice the precept: find without seeking

Learn the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.

Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect.

I aspire only to silence.

The more intense the nature of a man, the more readily will he find meditation, and the more successfully will he practice it.

As long as you look for a Buddha somewhere else, you'll never see that your own mind is the Buddha.

People don't see this side of me. They don't know I read, like, 800 million spiritual books. Lately I am just really getting into a lot of spirituality.

Meditation here may think down hours to moments. Here the heart may give a useful lesson to the head and learning wiser grow without his books.

Begin within. If it shows up in your life, it's coming to tell you something about you that you're acting like you don't know. Something about yourself, or your relationship with God.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

I found thee not, O Lord, without, because I erred in seeking thee without that wert within.

I've been practising Buddhism for forty years, and that's what has led me to this path of discovering my own humanity and recognizing the humanity in others.

Converse with men makes sharp the glittering wit, but God to man doth speak in solitude.

When you walk 10 hours, 11 hours a day by yourself, you are doing a walking meditation.

When I consider the deeper meaning of yoga, I realize it's about a lot more than simply performing a variety of postures on a mat.