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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

Zen has no business with ideas.
D.T. SUZUKI

Business Ideas People
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Buddhism Country Latin People Plato
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

Experience Facts Ordinary Thinking
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

Crush Fighting Warrior
Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
D.T. SUZUKI

Art Growing Technique
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

Fishing Sea Simple
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Eye Thirds Two Sides
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. SUZUKI

Borrowed Grows Plumage
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Eye Get Nature Real Retaining
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Ideas Reality Ruins
Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
D.T. SUZUKI

Agree Suffering Unless
Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
D.T. SUZUKI

Enlightenment Sides Work
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Book Boys Hands
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Believe Men Religious
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.
D.T. SUZUKI

Heart Religious Struggle
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Creating Kind Trying

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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