The straightforward mind is the place of practice, because it is free of falsehood

The straightforward mind is the place of practice in Japanese is 直心是道場無虚假故, which is read jikishin kore dōjō, koke naki ga yue ni. The line is Vimalakīrti's answer when he is asked where he has come from: not from a hall, but from the straight mind, because it holds no falsehood. 直心 (jikishin) is a mind that is straight and without pretense. 道場 (dōjō) here is the seat of awakening under the tree before it was ever a training hall, and the line's force for anyone who trains is that crossing. The fifth-century commentator Sengzhao put the lesson as a question: why leave the quiet ground close at hand and seek an empty place far off? The line came to Japan with the sutra and its commentators, Prince Shōtoku's first, in the seventh century. It reached the Zen halls through the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, which set it beside a second line of the same sutra, the straight mind is the Pure Land, and made it the definition of practice in daily motion, walking, standing, sitting and lying down. In 1909 Shaku Sōen, the abbot of Engakuji and the first Zen master to teach in America, called it a very fine phrase and said he sometimes wrote it on plaques and hanging scrolls and gave them away, the earliest hanging scroll of the line the record finds.