Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. SUZUKIProphecy 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.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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.
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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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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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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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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 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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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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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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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.
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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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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
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