- Lived:
- 1200–1253 · Kyoto, China's Zhejiang coast, and the snow mountains of Echizen, Japan
- Tradition:
- Japanese Zen Buddhism; founder of the Sōtō school
- The Big Idea:
- You do not practice in order to become enlightened, and you do not exist in time — practice is enlightenment already happening, and every being is its time.
- In their words:
- "To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self."
- If you remember one thing:
- He crossed the sea to solve one burning question — if we are already Buddha, why practice? — and came home with the strangest answer in the history of philosophy: because the practicing is the being.