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Our practice should be based on the ideal of selflessness. Selflessness is very difficult to understand. If you try to be selfless, that is already a selfish idea. Selflessness will be there when you do not try anything.
Shunryu Suzuki
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Shunryu Suzuki
Age: 67 †
Born: 1904
Born: May 18
Died: 1971
Died: December 4
Bhikkhu
Leader
Missionary
Philosopher
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Atlanta
Georgia
Practice
Idea
Selflessness
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Selfless
Difficult
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Anything
Selfish
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Ideals
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More quotes by Shunryu Suzuki
For Zen students a weed is a treasure. With this attitude, whatever you do, life becomes an art.
Shunryu Suzuki
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.
Shunryu Suzuki
It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.
Shunryu Suzuki
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.
Shunryu Suzuki
Christopher McCandless:I will miss you too, but you are wrong if you think that the joy of life comes principally from the joy of human relationships. God's place is all around us, it is in everything and in anything we can experience. People just need to change the way they look at things.
Shunryu Suzuki
An enlightened person does not ignore things and does not stick to things, not even to the truth.
Shunryu Suzuki
Religion is not any particular teaching. Religion is everywhere.
Shunryu Suzuki
It is only by practicing through a continual succession of agreeable and disagreeable situations that we acquire true strengths. To accept that pain is inherent and to live our lives from this understanding is to create the causes and conditions for happiness.
Shunryu Suzuki
To cook is not just to prepare food for someone or to cook for yourself it is to express your sincerity. So when you cook you should express yourself in your activity in the kitchen. You should allow yourself plenty of time.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zen is not some kind of excitement, but concentration on our usual everyday routine.
Shunryu Suzuki
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.
Shunryu Suzuki
If you were not born in this world, there would be no need to die. To be born in this world is to die, to disappear [laughing].
Shunryu Suzuki
We do not exist for the sake of something else. We exist for the sake of ourselves.
Shunryu Suzuki
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.
Shunryu Suzuki
When he bowed to all those buddhas, the buddhas he bowed to were beyond his own understanding. Again and again he did it.
Shunryu Suzuki
Time goes from present to past.
Shunryu Suzuki
Zazen practice is the direct expression of our true nature. Strictly speaking, for a human being, there is no other practice than this practice there is no other way of life than this way of life.
Shunryu Suzuki
Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement.
Shunryu Suzuki
Concentration comes not from trying hard to focus on something, but from keeping your mind open and directing it at nothing.
Shunryu Suzuki
Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility. However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem.
Shunryu Suzuki
