Quotes from Dainin Katagiri

Buddha is not divine. Buddha is your daily life.

We drank a cup of tea and ate a little umeboshi cake. I still remember the nice taste of that little cake in the shape of the sour umeboshi plum. Nothing special happened—we just sat there, eating that cake—but I felt really comfortable. That memory is very clear for me. Spending the day with my mother, just being present with her. No disturbance, no brothers there, just my mother and I, just living.

Four Noble Truths: the truth of the universality of suffering, the truth of the origin of suffering, the truth of the cessation of suffering, and the truth of the path leading to its cessation.

Transiency is the naked nature of time.

no matter how long you try to follow a meaningful purpose in life, impermanence always cuts it off.

All you have to do is take care of your posture and breathing with a kind, considerate, and thoughtful spirit.

Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security.

Actualization is not just the manifestation of your individual experience of the truth; it is your life interconnected with a tree's life, a bird's life, water's life, spring's life, autumn's life, and the life of the whole universe.

To take care of your life is to burn the flame of your life force in everything you do.

So I stayed with the old priest who was my teacher, but lots of unanswered questions always came up. Then I thought, "Why don't you teach me anything?" But my teacher didn't care. He just lived. He just let me be alive every day.

Change is the basis of human life, so don't attach yourself to birth or death, continuation or discontinuation. Just live right in the middle of the flow of change, where there is nothing to hold on to. How do you do this? Just be present and devote yourself to doing something. This is the simple practice of Zen.

All of us experience a gap between our minds and the reality of time—that's why we suffer.