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Facts of experience are valued in Zen more than representations, symbols, and concepts-that is to say, substance is everything in Zen and form nothing.

D.T. Suzuki

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D.T. Suzuki
Experience
Facts
Form
Representations
Everything
Valued
Nothing
Representation
Symbols
Substance
Concepts

More quotes by D.T. Suzuki

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Though perhaps less universally known than such figures as Einstein or Gandhi (who became symbols of our time) Daisetz Suzuki was no less remarkable a man than these. And though his work may not have had such resounding and public effect, he contributed no little to the spiritual and intellectual revolution of our time.
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Zen has no business with ideas.
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The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.
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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 Eden
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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 craving
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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.
D.T. Suzuki
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We can see unmistakeably that there is an inner relationship between Zen and the warrior's life.
D.T. Suzuki
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Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
D.T. Suzuki
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Eternity is the Absolute present.
D.T. Suzuki
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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
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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.
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Unless we die to ourselves, we can never be alive again.
D.T. Suzuki
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Let the intellect alone, it has its usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the flowing of the life-stream.
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen is the spirit of a man. Zen believes in his inner purity and goodness. Whatever is superadded or violently torn away, injures the wholesomeness of the spirit. Zen, therefore, is emphatically against all religious conventionalism.
D.T. Suzuki
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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 hearts
D.T. Suzuki
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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.
D.T. Suzuki
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The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.
D.T. Suzuki
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The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
D.T. Suzuki
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Unless we agree to suffer we cannot be free from suffering.
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.
D.T. Suzuki