To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
D.T. SUZUKINot to be bound by rules, but to be creating one’s own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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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.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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.
D.T. SUZUKI -
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. SUZUKI -
Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
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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.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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 -
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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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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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 -
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 -
When the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
D.T. SUZUKI