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. SUZUKITo be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha’s experience.
More D.T. Suzuki Quotes
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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 -
The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.
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 -
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
D.T. SUZUKI -
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. SUZUKI -
Zen has no business with ideas.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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 -
The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.
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 -
Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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 -
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. SUZUKI -
Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
D.T. SUZUKI -
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 waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
D.T. SUZUKI