Quotes from John Daido Loori

If you miss the moment, you miss your life.

If I was asked to get rid of the Zen aesthetic and just keep one quality necessary to create art, I would say it's trust. When you learn to trust yourself implicitly, you no longer need to prove something through your art. You simply allow it to come out, to be as it is. This is when creating art becomes effortless. It happens just as you grow your hair. It grows.

There is no gap between us and the process.

Everything is unhindered, clouds gracefully floating up to the peaks, the moonlight glitteringly flowing down mountain streams.

The future doesn't exist. It hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist. It has already happened.

The causes of evil karma are greed, anger, and ignorance—the three poisons. We create karma through action, by what we do with our body, words, and thoughts. In atoning we take full and unequivocal responsibility for it all. When we do that, we empower ourself. It becomes our evil karma, not someone else's. We acknowledge ourself as an active agent, not a passive victim. We begin to recognize that our life is not just something that happens to us.

Do not intend to make a buddha.…

The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation.

We constantly need to be reminded not to attach to anything.

We've come into this life fully equipped as a buddha, an awakened being, and we'll go out fully equipped as a buddha, realized or not.

When we realize the ground of being, we take responsibility directly, because what we realize is that what we do and what happens to us are the same thing.

Zen is a special transmission outside the scriptures, no reliance on words and letters, a direct pointing to the human mind, the realization of Buddhahood.

Thoughts well up in our mind moment by moment. But we refrain from doing anything with our thoughts. We just let everything come up freely and go away freely. We don't grasp anything. We don't try to control anything. We just sit.

As long as we blame, as long as we avoid or deny, we remove from the realm of possibility the power to do something about our lives. We become totally dependent upon the ups and downs we create around us.

Chanting and invoking are worlds apart. Chanting is done with the mouth; invoking is done with the mind. And because invoking comes from the mind, it is called a door to awareness. Chanting is centered in the mouth and appears as sound. If you cling to appearances while searching for meaning, you won't find a thing.

All evil karma ever committed by me since of old, Because of my beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance, Born of my body, mouth, and thought, Now I atone for it all.

transcendence of both unenlightenment

you begin to realize that The Mountains and Rivers Sutra is not a sutra about mountains and rivers, but rather that the mountains and rivers are themselves the sutra.

that we may each hear the calling of the bell, live more fully in reality, and nourish one another with wisdom's complete confidence and compassion's tender and soothing hands.

Buddha said that if you want to eradicate crime, the economic conditions of the people have to be improved.

What would it be like if the highly visible figures in the life of a nation started to set examples of moderation and humility rather than excessiveness and arrogance?

There is no place to search for the truth. Though it's right beneath your feet, it can't be found.

In the action of no-action (wu-wei), a cardinal aspect of the true creative process is set forth. In wu-wei, the mind is silenced and the work is allowed to express itself.

The future doesn't exist. It hasn't happened yet. The past doesn't exist. It has already happened.