That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins.
D.T. SUZUKIWe teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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We lose track of the Original Mind and are tormented all the time by the threatening objective world, regarding it as good or bad, true or false, agreeable or disagreeable. We are thus slaves of things and circumstances.
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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 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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When the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
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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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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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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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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
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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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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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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The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
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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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