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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

Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.
D.T. SUZUKI

Done Great Work Thinking
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
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
Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is.
D.T. SUZUKI

Past Running Time
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
We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way.
D.T. SUZUKI

Merely Points Teach Way
Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
D.T. SUZUKI

Enlightenment Sides Work
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
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Forgotten Ideas Realizing
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
To Zen, time and eternity are one.
D.T. SUZUKI

Eternity One Time
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
D.T. SUZUKI

Mean Moving Thinking
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
D.T. SUZUKI

All Bleeding Artist Great
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
When the identity is realized, I as swordsman see no opponent confronting me and threatening to strike me.
D.T. SUZUKI

Identity Movement Opponents
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.
D.T. SUZUKI

Archery Arrows Art

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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