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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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More quotes by 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
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One has not understood until one has forgotten it.
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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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 it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only borrowed plumage.
D.T. Suzuki
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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.
D.T. Suzuki
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Art always has something of the unconscious about it.
D.T. Suzuki
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Life, according to Zen, ought to be lived as a bird flies through the air, or as a fish swims in the water.
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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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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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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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.
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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Implicity, there should be something mysterious in every day.
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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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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Eternity is the Absolute present.
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
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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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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