For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
In your big mind, everything has the same value...In your practice you should accept everything as it is, giving to each thing the same respect given to a Buddha. Here there is Buddhahood
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing the intrinsic value of all things and treating everything with respect.
Shunryu Suzuki highlights the idea that within a broad and open mindset, everything holds equal significance. By cultivating a practice of acceptance and respect towards all beings and things, we can cultivate a sense of interconnectedness that reflects the essence of Buddhahood. This perspective encourages a compassionate approach to life, suggesting that enlightenment comes from recognizing the inherent worth in everything around us.
In practice
Sharing this quote at a meditation retreat to inspire participants to adopt a more compassionate view.
For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
If you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall.
As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down.
Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore.
If we were able to live at the level of the soul all the time, there would be no need for hindsight to appreciate the great truths of life.
I think it is a problem of our society that we don't enjoy (ourselves.) We have these values, like, you have to be rich, you have to get a diploma, you have to work hard, otherwise you are useless, you are nothing but a pariah. And the book asks, 'Is it true? This is what my mom told me, but is it true?
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.
A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm.
Look at those numbers running. Money makes time. It used to be the other way around. Clock time accelerated the rise of capitalism. People stopped thinking about eternity. They began to concentrate on hours, measurable hours,man-hours, using labor more efficiently.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.