Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘If the First Patriarch had not come from the west, how could the living beings of Eastern Lands have seen and heard the Buddha’s right Dharma? They would only have worried in vain over the sands and stone that are names and forms. Even those who have clothed themselves in fur and worn horns on their head, in a remote and distant land like ours, have now become able to hear our fill of the right Dharma. Now even peasants and plowmen, old country folk and village children, see and hear. It is totally due to the ancestral master’s maintenance of the practice in crossing the seas that we have been saved.’ (Shobogenzo Gyoji)