Shunryu Suzuki Quotes
Leave your front door and your back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don't serve them tea.
When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.
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.
Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.
If you can just appreciate each thing, one by one, then you will have pure gratitude. Even though you observe just one flower, that one flower includes everything
Wherever you go you will find your teacher, as long as you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
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.
It must be obvious...that there is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity.
When my master and I were walking in the rain, he would say, 'Do not walk so fast, the rain is everywhere.'
A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it....In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem.
It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
Whereever you are, you are one with the clouds and one with the sun and the stars you see. You are one with everything. That is more true than I can say, and more true than you can hear.
When we do not expect anything we can be ourselves. That is our way, to live fully in each moment of time.
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.
Moment after moment everything comes out of nothingness. This is the true joy of life.
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
To renounce things is not to give them up. It is to acknowledge that all things go away.
In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.
Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.
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.
When you are fooled by something else, the damage will not be so big. But when you are fooled by yourself, it is fatal. No more medicine.
What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.
The true practice to meditation is to sit as if you where drinking water when you are thirsty.
The person who can freely acknowledge that life is full of difficulties can be free, because they are acknowledging the nature of life - that it can't be much else.
When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
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.
Everything you do is right, nothing you do is wrong, yet you must still make ceaseless effort.
In the Lotus Sutra, Buddha says to light up one corner - not the whole world. Just make it clear where you are.
When you are just you, without thinking or trying to say something special, just saying what is on your mind and how you feel, then there is naturally self-respect.
Zen is not some fancy, special art of living. Our teaching is just to live, always in reality, in its exact sense. To make our effort, moment after moment, is our way.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself.
