When I asked my teacher Tendo Nyojo what the most important Buddhist principle was, he said that it was the idea that practice and experience were one and the same. That is, you don’t do zazen in order to achieve some result like enlightenment in the future. Zazen itself, he said, is enlightenment. Master Nangaku Ejo said, “I do not deny that there

We touch the deepest experience of all human beings throughout history when we allow ourselves to be truly quiet.

The perception of those individuals who practice zazen never interferes with the reality of zazen. It doesn’t matter if you notice all this wonderfulness or not. This is because in the quietness, with nothing to accomplish, there is only direct experience. This realization takes place in the stillness of the self-receiving and self-using samadhi

Nishijima Roshi’s way of explaining this was to say that Dōgen adopted four points of view when talking about any given topic. These four points of view were (1) idealism/subjectivism, (2) materialism/objectivism, (3) action, and (4) realism, which synthesizes the other three. We can look at any topic through these four lenses, and it will appear