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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.

D.T. Suzuki

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
D.T. SUZUKI

Art Growing Technique
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Archery Arrows Art
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Buddhism Country Latin People Plato
The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
D.T. SUZUKI

Heart Inspiring Moving
If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.
D.T. SUZUKI

Enlightenment Ignorance Silence
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Buddhist Enough Teaching
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. SUZUKI

Borrowed Grows Plumage
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Fishing Sea Simple
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Disagreeable Regarding Threatening Track
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
D.T. SUZUKI

Mean Moving Thinking
When the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
D.T. SUZUKI

Identity Movement Opponents
Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
D.T. SUZUKI

Agree Suffering Unless
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Forgotten Ideas Realizing
Absolute faith is placed in a man’s own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within.
D.T. SUZUKI

Absolute Faith Inner
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. SUZUKI

Mysterious Mystery Should
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Buddhism Essence Historical

Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.

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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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