Shunryu Suzuki
Shunryu Suzuki
Shunryu Suzukiwas a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, and is renowned for founding the first Buddhist monastery outside Asia. Suzuki founded San Francisco Zen Center, which along with its affiliate temples, comprises one of the most influential Zen organizations in the United States. A book of his teachings, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, is one of the most popular books on Zen and Buddhism in the West...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionLeader
Date of Birth18 May 1904
CountryJapan
When you live completely in each moment, without expecting anything, you have no idea of time.
Don't move. Just die over and over. Don't anticipate. Nothing can save you now because you have only this moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now because there are no other moments. With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully. Don't move.
For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity.
The teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.
You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.
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.
You see something or hear a sound, and there you have everything just as it is. [...] Whatever you do, it should be an expression of the same deep activity. We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else.
So it is not a matter of whether it is possible to attain Buddhahood, or if it is possible to make a tile a jewel. But just to work, just to live in this world with this understanding is the most important point, and that is our practice. That is true zazen.
As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
Faith is a state of openness or trust...In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all. Instead they are holding tight. But the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to the truth, whatever it might turn out to be.
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?" Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.
No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down.
Concentration comes not from trying hard to focus on something, but from keeping your mind open and directing it at nothing.