“I wanted a good place to settle:Cold Mountain would be safe.Light wind in a hidden pine -Listen close - the sound gets better.Under it a gray haired manMumbles along reading Huang and Lao.For ten years I havn't gone back homeI've even forgotten the way by which I came.”

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking." -- Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.”

“I thought, that day I started,I sure would hate to do this all my life,And dammit, that’s just whatI’ve gone and done.”

“In the mountains it's cold.Always been cold, not just this year.Jagged scarps forever snowed inWoods in the dark ravines spitting mist.Grass is still sprouting at the end of June,Leaves begin to fall in early August.And here I am, high on mountains,Peering and peering, but I can't even see the sky.”

“When men see Han-shanThey all say he's crazyAnd not much to look at -Dressed in rags and hides.They don't get what I sayAnd I don't talk their language.All I can say to those I meet:"Try and make it to Cold Mountain.”

“I’m sixty-eight” he said, “I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that’s just what I’ve gone and done.”

“I thought I heard an axe chop in the woods It broke the dream; and woke up dreaming on a train. It must have been a thousand years ago In some old mountain sawmill of Japan. A horde of excess poets and unwed girls And I that night prowled Tokyo like a bear Tracking the human future Of intelligence and despair.”