Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
D.T. SUZUKIZen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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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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 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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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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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 Zen, time and eternity are one.
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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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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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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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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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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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That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins.
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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