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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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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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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
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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.
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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.
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When mountain-climbing is made too easy, the spiritual effect the mountain exercises vanishes into the air.
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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
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One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
D.T. Suzuki
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies.
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The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.
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Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?
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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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You ought to know how to rise above the trivialities of life, in which most people are found drowning themselves.
D.T. Suzuki
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The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?
D.T. Suzuki
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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.
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Zen in it's essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.
D.T. Suzuki
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The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
D.T. Suzuki
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When I say that Zen is life, I mean that Zen is not to be confined within conceptualization, that Zen is what makes conceptualization possible.
D.T. Suzuki
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The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics.
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen teaches nothing it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
D.T. Suzuki