A Quote by Dogen

Mountains and rivers at this very moment are the actualization of the world of the ancient Buddhas. Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness.

Dogen

Quote Topics

Abiding Actualization Ancient Completeness Each Expression Moment Mountains Phenomenal Rivers Very World

Quote Author

Dogen
Japanese - Leader
January 19, 1200 - September 22, 1253

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

My engagement with mountains, rivers, and forests has been right from my childhood. I have lived in the jungles by myself; I have floated down rivers. So, I didn't experience these rivers, mountains, forests as some mythological figures but as thriving, living entities.

Jaggi Vasudev

I grew up going around with family, camping and living in a very beautiful mountain valley, knowing the names of the mountains and the rivers. I think it's no accident that I ended up studying the geography of India and knowing the names of the mountains and the rivers and all of that. I loved it. I think it gives a sense of space and a can-do-ness that was very powerful.

Diana L. Eck

I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

Go toward self-actualization rather than self-image actualization... Search within... for honest self- expression.

Bruce Lee

An ancient buddha said, “Mountains are mountains; waters are waters.” These words do not mean mountains are mountains; they mean mountains are mountains.

Dogen

Since we are already Buddhas, happy and suffering Buddhas, wise and confused Buddhas, we are already Buddha.

Joan Halifax

This dream of absolute, universal equality is amazing, terrifying, and inhuman. And the moment it captures people's minds, the result is mountains of corpses and rivers of blood.

Vladimir Bukovsky

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.

William Blake

The mountains are fountains of men as well as of rivers, of glaciers, of fertile soil. The great poets, philosophers, prophets, able men whose thoughts and deeds have moved the world, have come down from the mountains - mountain dwellers who have grown strong there with the forest trees in Nature's workshops.

John Muir

Before practicing meditation, we see that mountains are mountains. When we start to practice, we see that mountains are no longer mountains. After practicing a while, we see that mountains are again mountains. Now the mountains are very free. Our mind is still with the mountains, but it is no longer bound to anything.

Nhat Hanh

When a buddha is painted, not only a clay altar or lump of earth is used, but the thirty-two marks, a blade of grass, and the cultivation of wisdom for incalculable eons are used. As a Buddha has been painted on a single scroll in this way, all buddhas are painted buddhas, and all painted buddhas are actual buddhas.

Dogen

What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.

Tom Wolfe

Whoever realizes that the six senses aren't real, that the five aggregates are fictions, that no such things can be located anywhere in the body, understands the language of Buddhas.

Bodhidharma

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.