Mr. Fukuoka gathered us to­gether to dis­cuss his phi­los­o­phy. These ses­sions were dif­fi­cult for me. Al­though I could speak Ja­pa­nese flu­ently, I was more flu­ent in the ev­ery­day lan­guage we used around the farm. The philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tual ex­pres­sions he used dur­ing these dis­cus­sions were im­pos­si­ble for me to un­der­stand. What made this even more frus­trat­ing was that Mr. Fukuoka told us over and over that the phi­los­o­phy was ev­ery­thing, and the farm­ing was merely an ex­am­ple of the phi­los­o­phy. “If you do not un­der­stand the phi­los­o­phy,” he said, “the rest be­comes empty ac­tiv­ity. Larry Korn

I simply emptied my mind and tried to absorb what I could from nature.

I spent many years of my youth fool­ishly search­ing for some­thing I “should” have been do­ing. In­stead, I should have en­trusted ev­ery­thing to the flow­ers bloom­ing in the meadow. Even if peo­ple do noth­ing at all, the grasses and trees and the song­birds will live on.

I look for­ward to the day when there is no need for sa­cred scrip­tures or su­tras. The drag­on­fly will be the mes­siah.

No mat­ter how much hu­mans search for free­dom from the fear of not know­ing, in the end, they should just re­turn to the re­al­ity of na­ture and live their lives in peace.

The ul­ti­mate goal of the West­ern philoso­phers, who are ex­plor­ing the world of the in­di­vid­ual self, and the re­li­gious peo­ple of the East, who are seek­ing the tran­scen­dent self, is to elu­ci­date the orig­i­nal mind that mys­te­ri­ously oc­curs as part of ex­is­tence it­self. It is only through na­ture that we can see this orig­i­nal mind.
 Any­way, none of these ideas—life, death, spirit, the soul—es­capes the frame­work of rel­a­tive thought. They are noth­ing more than ab­stract no­tions built up of judg­ments and cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing based on hu­man think­ing. Peo­ple have cre­ated a world of ghosts called the here­after. But no mat­ter how much hu­mans search for free­dom from the fear of not know­ing, in the end, they should just re­turn to the re­al­ity of na­ture and live their lives in peace.

Tran­scen­dent time, or time as it ex­ists in na­ture, is a con­tin­u­ous mo­ment of the present. When one sees and op­er­ates within that time and space, it is the unity of all things that is per­ceived.

If you un­der­stand the spirit of a sin­gle flower, you un­der­stand ev­ery­thing. You un­der­stand that re­li­gion, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence are one, and at the same time they are noth­ing at all.