Shunryu Suzuki Quotes - Page 6

You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.

We do not slight the idea of enlightenment, but the most important thing is this moment, not some day in the future. We have to make our effort in this moment. This is the most important thing for our practice.

The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so.... In Japanese, it's two words, three words in English. That is the secret of our practice.

And we should forget, day by day, what we have done; this is true non-attachment. And we should do something new. To do something new, of course we must know our past, and this is alright. But we should not keep holding onto anything we have done; we should only reflect on it. And we must have some idea of what we should do in the future. But the future is the future, the past is the past; now we should work on something new.

As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind pervades your whole body.

We have to study with our warm heart, not just with our brain.

A Master who cannot bow to a disciple cannot bow to Buddha.

For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.

If you want to enjoy the movie, you should know that it is the combination of film and light and white screen, and that the most important thing is to have a plain, white screen.

If your practice is good, you may become proud of it. What you do is good, but something more is added to it. Pride is extra. Right effort is to get rid of something extra.

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice.

Christopher McCandless:"I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.

Wabi means spare, impoverished; simple and functional. It connotes a transcendence of fad and fashion. The spirit of wabi imbues all the Zen arts, from calligraphy to karate, from the tea ceremony to Zen archery.

When you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else. When you do not try to attain anything, you have your own body and mind right here. In Buddhism it is a heretical view to expect something outside this world. We do not seek for something besides ourselves.

The goal of our life’s effort is to reach the other shore, Nirvana. Prajna paramita, the true wisdom of life, is that in each step of the way, the other shore is actually reached.

We do not exist for the sake of something else. We exist for the sake of ourselves.

From True Emptiness The Wondrous Being Appears

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing.

There should not be any particular teaching. Teaching is in each moment.

No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.

Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always toward ourselves.

If you were not born in this world, there would be no need to die. To be born in this world is to die, to disappear [laughing].

We ourselves cannot put any magic spells on this world. The world is its own magic.

You may say that things happen just by chance, but I don't feel that way.