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. 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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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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The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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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 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 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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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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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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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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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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Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
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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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Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
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To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
D.T. SUZUKI