Dainin Katagiri Quotes

“If you want to take care of tomorrow, take better care of today. We always live now. All we have to do is entrust ourselves to the life we now live.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“The important point of spiritual practice is not to try to escape your life, but to face it - exactly and completely.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“The point of the spiritual life is to realize Truth. But you will never understand the spiritual life, or realize Truth, if you measure it by your own yardstick.”

— Dainin Katagiri

Karma is not something pessimistic. If you think of karma as something wrong, you are seeing karma only according to what happened in the past. You look at the past and karma becomes a monster. So you should also look at karma in the present and future. Then karma becomes something very wide and really alive. Through karma you can understand what your destiny is. Destiny itself has no solid form; it's something you can create. You can create your life. That is why we study karma.

— Dainin Katagiri

“If you want to find Buddha nature, love someone and care for them.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“You have to do your best to face every moment, because this moment will never come again. The moment that you are living right now is a very important opportunity to make your life vividly alive. If you want to live with spiritual security in the midst of constant change, you have to burn the flame of your life force in everything you do.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“Accept that your life is going on beyond your usual understanding.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“You cannot find any peace by escaping from human pain and suffering; you have to find peace and harmony right in the midst of human pain. That is the purpose of spiritual life”

— Dainin Katagiri

Compassion is like springwater under the ground. Your life is like a pipe that can tap into that underground spring. When you tap into it, water immediately comes up. So drive your pipe into the ground. Tap into the water of compassion.

— Dainin Katagiri

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

— Dainin Katagiri

“If you see the intersection of time and space, you experience complete freedom of being. This state of existence is completely beyond any idea of time, space, or being. In that liberated state you can see fundamental truth and the phenomenal world simultaneously. That is called Buddha's world. That is the place where all sentient beings exist, so you can stand up there and see all beings, myriad beings. Then you know very clearly, through your own emotional and intellectual understanding, how all beings exist.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“Whatever you think is delusion.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“The nature of ignorance is to lack deep communication with nature or with the universe. It is to separate, to isolate, to create discrimination and differences, so that finally we cannot communicate as a harmonious whole. These differences we create appear as fighting, anger, hatred, and war.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“Spiritual security means you are fully alive and comfortable in your life as it is, without expecting anything.”

— Dainin Katagiri

Make positive effort for the good.

— Dainin Katagiri

“Be present, from moment to moment, right in the middle of the real stream of time. That gives you spiritual security. That is why in Buddhism we don't try to escape from impermanence; we face time itself in our daily living.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“Real knowing comes up when we stand in the appropriate place. But usually we don't. First we want to understand something according to individual knowledge, prejudice, customs and habits. This means we are standing up in our individual place, not the universal perspective. This egoistic behavior makes it very difficult to see the overall picture. But buddhas and ancestors recommend that we first stand up in the appropriate place. Just stand up, be present in the Universe itself.”

— Dainin Katagiri

“The moment between before and after is called Truth.”

— Dainin Katagiri