12 Quotes by Soko Morinaga

The heart, the life that is within you, is born in companionship with the environment. Your heart is the life of the great universe. Our own hearts are the womb from which everything originates...

I believe from the bottom of my heart that what we call religion is the very most important matter for human beings. I cannot stress enough that the ultimate goal of religion, whether we call it satori or peace of mind, is for each individual to live in peace and tranquility, to live a full and satisfying life.

Enlightenment... is the vivid, lively manifestation of the heart with which one is born--the heart that is no-form, no-mind, nonabiding, attached neither to form nor to thought, but in dynamic motion.

There is no clump called “I” moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant. Rather, through particular encounters with particular people, within each encounter, within each transition, something called “I” makes its appearance. Thus it is that what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your complement, that which gives this instant of your life its glow.

Within you there is eternal life. This life arise as form and continues, instant by instant, appearing and disappearing. Moreover, this flickering, appearing and disappearing, is not the flickering of a solidified individual self; it is the sparkling appearance and disappearance of a fusion of the self and its surroundings, in union.

But what we thought to be ‘right,’ turned out overnight to be ‘wrong.’ We may live another forty or fifty years, but are we ever going to be able to believe in anything again—in a ‘right’ that can’t be altered, in a ‘wrong’ that isn’t going to change on us? If we don’t resolve this for ourselves, no amount of study is ever going to help us build conviction in anything.

If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place.

Many people are willing to learn techniques that help them live their lives. But the person who seeks to confirm their life at its roots by reaching beyond technique to the fundamentals—to true religion—is exceedingly rare. I find this state of affairs most regrettable. That is why I can’t help but urge you to refrain from evaluating your daily life on the basis of what you think you know, on the basis of collected data.

From the first, in people and in things, there is no such thing as trash. These words point to the fundamental truth of Buddhism, a truth I could not as yet conceive in those days.