Quote

Let your ears hear without trying to hear. Let the mind think without trying to think and without trying to stop it. That is practice.

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
Think
Thinking
Ears
Hear
Stop
Practice
Without
Trying
Mind

More quotes by Shunryu Suzuki

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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.
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The true practice to meditation is to sit as if you where drinking water when you are thirsty.
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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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So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others...before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you.
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In the Lotus Sutra, Buddha says to light up one corner - not the whole world. Just make it clear where you are.
Shunryu Suzuki
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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.
Shunryu Suzuki
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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.
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An enlightened person does not ignore things and does not stick to things, not even to the truth.
Shunryu Suzuki
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From True Emptiness The Wondrous Being Appears
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Concentration comes not from trying hard to focus on something, but from keeping your mind open and directing it at nothing.
Shunryu Suzuki
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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.
Shunryu Suzuki
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Enlightenment is not a complete remedy.
Shunryu Suzuki
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If you cannot bow to Buddha, you cannot be a Buddha. It is arrogance.
Shunryu Suzuki
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All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake.
Shunryu Suzuki
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In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few.
Shunryu Suzuki
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To express yourself as you are, without any intentional, fancy way of adjusting yourself, is the most important thing.
Shunryu Suzuki
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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.
Shunryu Suzuki
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In the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities. In the mind of the expert there are few.
Shunryu Suzuki
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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
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If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special.
Shunryu Suzuki