Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
D.T. SUZUKIUnless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.
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As soon as you raise a thought and begin to form an idea of it, you ruin the reality itself, because you then attach yourself to form.
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The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.
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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins.
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Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one’s own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism.
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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
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I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
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I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of this desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring woods:-in all these I am practicing Zen, I am living Zen. No worldly discussion is necessary, or any explanation.
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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
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To be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha’s experience.
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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
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When the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
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Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.
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All great artists, all great religious leaders, and all great social reformers have come out of the intensest struggles which they fought bravely, quite frequently in tears and with bleeding hearts
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Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one’s own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.
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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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Prophecy is rash, but it may be that the publication of D.T. Suzuki’s first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem to future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke’s Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino’s of Plato in the fifteenth.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
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The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.
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A simple fishing boat in the midst of the rippling waters is enough to awaken in the mind of the beholder a sense of vastness of the sea and at the same time of peace and contentment – the Zen sense oof the alone.
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. SUZUKI