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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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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.
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One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
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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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Dhyana is retaining one's tranquil state of mind in any circumstance, unfavorable as well as favorable, and not being disturbed or frustrated even when adverse conditions present themselves one after another.
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Among the most remarkable features characterizing Zen we find these: spirituality, directness of expression, disregard of form or conventionalism, and frequently an almost wanton delight in going astray from respectability.
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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.
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The mind has first to be attuned to the Unconscious.
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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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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The right art is purposeless, aimless! The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.
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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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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
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Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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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.
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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.
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We can see unmistakeably that there is an inner relationship between Zen and the warrior's life.
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Unless we die to ourselves, we can never be alive again.
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I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life.
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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
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