1st At the Young Women’s Meeting the Head Priest also said, “Buddhism is called ‘the way of introspection.’ What is important is to admit your inability to find your own way out of darkness. If your mind is only directed towards the outside, you will never be able to feel content but will always be full of frustrations.”
2nd
 At the Young Women’s Meeting the Head Priest likewise said, “If your mind is split in two, then those two halves will begin to battle. If you would like to attain true faith, you should try not to be two-faced.”
3rd The Head Priest said, “The temple is not a ‘place’ where you acquire something by practice but a ‘place’ where you are enabled to make a resolution to take responsibility for yourself.”
4th At the Young Women’s Meeting the Head Priest also said, “Your courage in taking responsibility for yourself gives your children vitality.”
5th The Head Priest said, “When you feel ‘hollow’ inside, that is the time you really need true encounter.”
6th

The Head Priest said, “Religion is definitely there to help us to overcome our ego. In modern times, because individuals are attached to their ‘ego’, they cannot find freedom and they become more and more frustrated. The true benefit of religion is to be found in our everyday lives.”
7th
 The Head Priest said, “The cause of war in this world is simply our own blind passions as found in our selfish love for wife and child and for our own bodies and lives. War is the result of the internal conflict within us between love and hate.”


8th The Head Priest said, “It is because of the age we live in that we should teach children to cherish prayerful minds.”
9th The Head Priest said, “The nembutsu of grateful response for what has been done for one is not an action directed towards others. It is the working of something beyond one’s own individual power.”
10th At the forty-ninth day memorial service for her husband a widow said, “My late husband encouraged me not to panic but to accept reality just as it is.”


  
11st The Head Priest said, “We long for something creative in which to find the meaning of life. True creativity lies in rediscovering our past, the past we were previously unable to appreciate. This awakening is a moving experience, for we have thereby transcended transmigration.”
12th The Head Priest also said, “Memory is malleable, not always fixed in stone. When a memory of true encounter with others comes back to us, we find creativity.”
13th Returning from London, Reverend Kemmyo T. Sato said, “The service of chanting sutras that unites the voices of both priests and lay people reverberates in a refreshing way. It is such a ‘selfless’ voice. The service sounds like a whole ‘multitudes of holy beings in the Pure Land’ serving the Buddha.”
14th The Head Priest said, “If you do not become awakened now, your past will remain forever lost. But it can also be said that when your past returns the present too will be revealed.”
15th Professor John White from the U.K. said, “What we call imagination and creativity is bringing together two things that were already there but not brought together before.”
16th The Head Priest said, “When we become aware that not only our minds but our bodies too are precious gifts, we are overtaken by a feeling of gratitude. The problems we are experiencing right now become instead a very source of peace.”
17th The Head Priest said, “When we are awakened to how selfish our primal nature is, we also become aware of the nembutsu within. Our daily life is nothing but a grateful response for what has been done for us.”
18th At the Young Women’s Meeting a mother of two said, “We ought to entrust ourselves to the Buddha, but in my case I have simply found myself to be dependent on others. While failing to take responsibility upon myself, I have been blaming others for every problem I have experienced.”
19th At the Young Women’s Meeting a mother of two said, “Seeking to escape from my own responsibilities I have simply been asking others on whom I am dependent to take the onus upon themselves. I have found loneliness is deeply embedded in this attitude of mine.”
20th The Head Priest said, “ ‘Equality’ is not something we, humans, can claim to have with one another. To me ‘respect’ stands on the other side of ‘equality’.”
21st At the Young Women’s Meeting a mother said, “I am now aware that to become a ‘parent’ I simply need to become a ‘child’ once more.”


22nd At the Young Women’s Meeting a mother said, “Illuminated by others I am able to find the courage to make a decision.”
23rd A musician form the Imperial Palace declared, “You should not play music with your eyes closed. Closing one’s eyes is a form of escape from reality.”
24th A father said to his daughter, who herself has two children, “My daughter’s actions reflect my own. Children are mirrors of their parents.”
25th The Head Priest said, “‘Light’ in Shin Buddhism is what forms the foundation of Pure Land Teaching. It is not a teaching that we can understand through scientific reasoning or the karmic law of cause and effect.”
26th The Head Priest said, “Shin Buddhist similes such as ‘light’ and ‘ocean’ are the deep and luminous expressions that reflect our joy at meeting the nembutsu welling forth from within.”
27th The Head Priest said, “Our way of seeking after truth in our daily lives is neither meeting with world of nature nor understanding the principle or theory of the Dharma. Our way is the process of transforming ourselves in our daily lives through our encounter with good friends (all the Buddhas).”
28th The Head Priest said, “When we suffer, others become mirrors that reflect ourselves and teach us how to solve our problems.”
29th The Head Priest said, “When you come to reflect on how it is you are able to live your daily lives, then the path to the Pure Land will be opened up to you.”
30th The teaching of the Pure Land was revealed when Ananda discovered Shakyamuni as the ‘Buddha of Light’.”
31st The Head Priest said, “In contrast to nothingness, Emptiness is the way in which things are revealed by means of their negation.”