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
The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.
Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.
When we do not expect anything we can be ourselves. That is our way, to live fully in each moment of time.
It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
Moment after moment everything comes out of nothingness. This is the true joy of life.
Nothing outside yourself can cause any trouble. You yourself make the waves in your mind. If you leave your mind as it is, it will become calm. This mind is called big mind.
Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
When we have our body and mind in order, everything else will exist in the right place, in the right way. But usually, without being aware of it, we try to change something other than ourselves; we try to order things outside us. But it is impossible to organize things if you yourself are not in order. When you do things in the right way, at the right time, everything else will be organized.
Moment after moment, completely devote yourself to listening to your inner voice.
When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
Instead of criticizing, find out how to help.
The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves.
Happiness is sorrow; sorrow is happiness. There is happiness in difficulty; difficulty in happiness. Even though the ways we feel are different, they are not really different; in essense they are the same. This is the true understanding transmitted from Buddha to us.
Meditation opens the mind to the greatest mystery that takes place daily and hourly; it widens the heart so that it may feel the eternity of time and infinity of space in every throb; it gives us a life within the world as if we were moving about in paradise.