Dogen Zenji Quotes

A shadow of a reflection of an image of an illusion.

Shut your eyes and you will know what I mean by thought entombed in darkness. Light comes through the senses, and not only through the sense of sight. When you see without feeling, you are still partly blind; you lack the inner light that brings awareness. Awareness requires the interplay of every faculty, the use of your entire being as an eye.

People normally cut reality into compartments, and so are unable to see the interdependence of all phenomena. To see one in all and all in one is to break through the great barrier which narrows one's perception of reality.

It was just the two of us, inside there with just mirrors, all the way around us. Everywhere we looked, there were these two freaks, sitting at a table, eyeballing each other.

It seems then that it is not the excellence of any two things (or more) in themselves, but those two things as viewed by the light of each other, that makes beauty.

Open your eyes at last and see... now I will open the book of the world for you,there are no words in it, just pictures.

Our ancient experience confirms at every point that everything is linked together, everything is inseparable.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep.

Spirituality is not about becoming special. It is about becoming one with everything.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

Oh, he was the sun burning bright and brittle And she was the moon shining back his light a little He was a shooting star She was softer and more slowly He could not make things possible But, she could make them holy.

One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole

Life is a manifestation of unity.

The camera is a mirror with a memory, but it cannot think.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

I played with the image, because I think image is temporary. It's a projection. It's illusory.

We look at the mountain to see the painting, then we look at the painting to see the mountain.

It is no secret that the moon has no light of her own, but is, as it were, a mirror, receiving brightness from the influence of the sun.

And whiter grows the foam, The small moon lightens more; And as I turn me home, My shadow walks before.

He saw things in a way that others did not, so that a city I had lived in all my life seemed a different place, so that a woman became beautiful with the light on her face.

The late evening is the time of times. Then with that unearthly beauty before one it is not hard to realise how far one has to go. To write something that will be worthy of that rising moon, that pale light.

The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.

Look at the moon in the sky, not the one in the lake.