Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
D.T. SUZUKITechnical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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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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 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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Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
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Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is.
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We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
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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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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.
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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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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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Zen purposes to discipline the mind itself, to make it its own master, through an insight into its proper nature. This getting into the real nature of one’s own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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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 ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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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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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
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The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
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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.
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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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Not 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.
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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.
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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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I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
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To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.
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