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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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More quotes by 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.
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When we start to feel anxious or depressed, instead of asking, What do I need to get to be happy? The question becomes, What am I doing to disturb the inner peace that I already have?
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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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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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Zen approaches it from the practical side of life-that is, to work out Enlightenment in life itself.
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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Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
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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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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One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
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Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.
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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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Zen, in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. By making us drink right from the fountain of life it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.
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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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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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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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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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 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 wants us to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature. This is because Zen has come to the definite conclusion that the ordinary logical process of reasoning is powerless to give final satisfaction to our deepest spiritual needs.
D.T. Suzuki