10 Shunryu Suzuka Quotes on Mindfulness

Shunryu Suzuka quotes on mindfulness

2. When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

4. There are, strictly speaking, no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.

6. The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

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

9. After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet. In a fog, you do not know you are getting wet, but as you keep walking you get wet little by little. If your mind has ideas of progress, you may say, 'Oh, this pace is terrible!' But actually it is not. When you get wet in a fog it is very difficult to dry yourself. So there is no need to worry about progress.

10. If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall.

11. Hell is not punishment. It's training.

14. So the secret is just to say 'Yes!' and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self.

17. Life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore, nor actual difficulty in our life.

18. As soon as you see something, you already start to intellectualize it. As soon as you intellectualize something, it is no longer what you saw.