Eternity is the Absolute present.
D.T. SUZUKIWhen the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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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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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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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When I say that Zen is life, I mean that Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization, that Zen is what makes conceptualization possible.
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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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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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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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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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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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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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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We do not realize that as soon as our thoughts cease and all attempts at forming ideas are forgotten the Buddha reveals himself before us.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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We have two eyes to see two sides of things, but there must be a third eye which will see everything at the same time and yet not see anything. That is to understand Zen.
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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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To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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Absolute faith is placed in a man’s own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within.
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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 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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The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
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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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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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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 fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.
D.T. SUZUKI