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The true practice to meditation is to sit as if you where drinking water when you are thirsty.

Shunryu Suzuki

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Shunryu Suzuki
Age: 67 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 18
Died: 1971
Died: December 4
Bhikkhu
Leader
Missionary
Philosopher
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Thirsty
Drinking
Meditation
Practice
Water
True

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When you sit, everything sits with you.
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When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything.
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Nothing we see or hear is perfect. But right there in the imperfection is perfect reality.
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The way that helps will not be the same it changes according to the situation.
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It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
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The world is its own magic.
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Meditation opens the mind to the greatest mystery that takes place daily and hourly it widens the heart so that it may feel the eternity of time and infinity of space in every throb it gives us a life within the world as if we were moving about in paradise.
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If you cannot bow to Buddha, you cannot be a Buddha. It is arrogance.
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Life without zazen is like winding your clock without setting it. It runs perfectly well, but it dosen't tell time.
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When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
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People who know the state of emptiness will always be able to dissolve their problems by constancy.
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When he bowed to all those buddhas, the buddhas he bowed to were beyond his own understanding. Again and again he did it.
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True communication depends upon our being straightforward with one another... But the best way to communicate may be just to sit without saying anything.
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A flower falls, even though we love it and a weed grows, even though we do not love it....In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem.
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When you say, Wait a moment, you are bound by your karma when you say Yes I will, you are free.
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Our mind should be free from traces of the past, just like the flowers of spring.
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When you do something, if you fix your mind on the activity with some confidence, the quality of your state of mind is the activity itself. When you are concentrated on the quality of your being, you are prepared for the activity.
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Someone was sitting in front of a sunflower, watching the sunflower, a cup of sun, and so I tried it too. It was wonderful I felt the whole universe in the sunflower. That was my experience. Sunflower meditation. A wonderful confidence appeared. You can see the whole universe in a flower.
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We ourselves cannot put any magic spells on this world. The world is its own magic.
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Although we have no actual written communications from the world of emptiness, we have some hints or suggestions about what is going on in that world, and that is, you might say, enlightenment. When you see plum blossoms or hear the sound of a small stone hitting bamboo, that is a letter from the world of emptiness.
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