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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
Everything
Valued
Nothing
Representation
Symbols
Substance
Concepts
Experience
Facts
Form
Representations

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.
D.T. Suzuki
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To Zen, time and eternity are one.
D.T. Suzuki
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
D.T. Suzuki
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To live - is that not enough?
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.
D.T. Suzuki
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Because since the beginningless past we are running after objects, not knowing where our Self is, we lose track of the Original Mind and are tormented all the time by the threatening objective world, regarding it as good or bad, true or false, agreeable or disagreeable. We are thus slaves of things and circumstances.
D.T. Suzuki
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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.
D.T. Suzuki
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One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
D.T. Suzuki
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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
D.T. Suzuki
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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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Zen teaches nothing it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
D.T. Suzuki
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I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.
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.
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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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.
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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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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Unless we die to ourselves, we can never be alive again.
D.T. Suzuki
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
D.T. Suzuki
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Zen Makes use, to a great extent, of poetical expressions Zen is wedded to poetry.
D.T. Suzuki