Dhyana is retaining one’s tranquil state of mind in any circumstance, unfavorable as well as favorable, and not being disturbed or frustrated even when adverse conditions present themselves one after another.
D.T. SUZUKIGreat works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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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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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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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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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
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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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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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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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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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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That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins.
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I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
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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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Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
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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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Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is.
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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
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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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The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
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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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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
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