D.T. Suzuki
When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, "What do I need to get to be happy?" The question becomes, "What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?"Collection: Inner Peace
Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.Collection: Suffering
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.Collection: Grows
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.Collection: Wake Up
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. 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 heartsCollection: Religious
Thought creates things by slicing up reality into small bits that it can easily grasp. Thus when you are think-ing you are thing-ing. Thought does not report things, it distorts reality to create things, and as Bergson noted, "In so doing it allows what is the very essence of the real to escape." Thus to the extent we actually imagine a world of discrete and separate things, conceptions have become perceptions, and we have in this manner populated our universe with nothing but ghosts.Collection: Real
I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.Collection: Inspirational
Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.Collection: Facts
The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.Collection: Inspiring
When traveling is made too easy and comfortable, its spiritual meaning is lost. This may be called sentimentalism, but a certain sense of loneliness engendered by traveling leads one to reflect upon the meaning of life, for life is after all a travelling from one unknown to another unknown.Collection: Life
You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.Collection: Life Lesson
Eternity is the Absolute present.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Eye
In the spiritual world there are no time divisions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense. The past and the future are both rolled up in this present moment of illumination, and this present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.Collection: Spiritual
If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.Collection: Ignorance
Great works are done when one is not calculating and thinking.Collection: Thinking
To live - is that not enough?Collection: Enough
The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.Collection: Ego
The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.Collection: Life
Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Ideas
Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?Collection: Space
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.Collection: Moving
The basic idea of Zen is to come in touch with the inner workings of our being, and to do this in the most direct way possible, without resorting to anything external or superadded. Therefore, anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within.Collection: Men
Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.Collection: Mysterious
Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism... We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task.Collection: Grateful
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Buddhism
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.Collection: Plato
The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.Collection: Mind
Zen in it's essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.Collection: Art
To point at the moon a finger is needed, but woe to those who take the finger for the moon.Collection: Moon
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Reality
Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.Collection: Two
Zen opens a man's eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of EdenCollection: Heart
Unless we die to ourselves, we can never be alive again.Collection: Alive
Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.Collection: Life
The rocks are where they are- and this is their will. The rivers flow- and this is their will. The birds fly- this is their will. Human beings talk- this is their will. The seasons change, heaven sends down rain or snow, the earth occasionally shakes, the waves roll, the stars shine- each of them follows its own will. To be is to will and so is to become.Collection: Stars
Zen has no business with ideas.Collection: Ideas
The worst passion we mortals cherish is the desire to possess. Even when we know that our final destination is a hole not more than three feet square, we have the strongest cravingCollection: Passion
Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.Collection: Aim
Zen abhors repetition or imitation of any kind, for it kills. For the same reason Zen never explains, but only affirms. Life is fact and no explanation is necessary or pertinent. To explain is to apologize, and why should we apologize for living? To live—is that not enough? Let us then live, let us affirm! Herein lies Zen in all its purity and in all its nudity as well.Collection: Life
That's why I love philosophy: no one wins.Collection: Philosophy
The meaning of service is to do the work assigned ungrudgingly and without thought of personal reward material or moral.Collection: Work
Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.Collection: Expression
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.Collection: Creating
Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is, 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.Collection: Running
Personal experience, therefore, is everything in Zen. No ideas are intelligible to those who have no backing of experience.Collection: Ideas
The intuitive recognition of the instant, thus reality is the highest act of wisdom.Collection: Reality