Dogen Zenji Quotes

You must be true to your own way until at last you actually come to the point where you see it is necessary to forget all about yourself.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

Each one of us must make his own true way, and when we do, that way will express the universal way.

Surely the true path is to dive deep into nature.

Paradise is at your own center; unless you find it there, there is no way to enter.

What I believe is that we have this extraordinary spirit inside ourselves, which for me is our Buddha nature. I believe we are in the process of opening and getting closer and closer to our Buddha nature and stripping away all that is covering it. I don't think I'm going to end up meeting this one being up there or out there.

The point is to strip down, get protestant, then even more naked. Walk over scorched bricks to find your own soul. Your heart a searching dog in the rubble.

Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.' Say not, ' I have found the path of the soul.' Say rather, 'I have met the soul walking upon my path.' For the soul walks upon all paths. The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed. The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.

If you are on an honest journey to find yourself, you'll find God.

The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into human life.

Though the universe is delightfully complex, life, at its heart, is not particularly complicated. Live true to who you are and though it won't always be easy, you'll live well.

You can't make a date with enlightenment.

To find your own way is to follow your bliss.

The best way to be more like me is to be more like you.

If we go for the easy way, then we never change.

The purpose of life is to know yourself, create yourself, experience yourself as Who You Really Are. There is no other reason to do anything.

Each of us has a Soul. But no one has stopped to tell us what the Soul is in the world to do. Or if they have told us, they've given us incomplete information - for example, that our job is to get back to God. That is not our job. We couldn't get back to God if we wanted to, because we never left God.

The way to form transcends its own destination, goes beyond the end of the way itself.

Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.

The book that I shall make people read is the book of the heart, which holds the key to the mystery of life

I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.

Each man had only one genuine vocation to find the way to himself.

Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.