I am an artist at living – my work of art is my life.
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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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.
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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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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
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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.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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Dhyana is retaining one’s tranquil state of mind in any circumstance, unfavorable as well as favorable, and not being disturbed or frustrated even when adverse conditions present themselves one after another.
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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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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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Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
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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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