For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Leave your front door and your back door open. _x000D_ Allow your thoughts to come and go. _x000D_ Just don't serve them tea.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote encourages mindfulness and detachment from one's thoughts.
Shunryu Suzuki's quote emphasizes the importance of allowing thoughts to flow freely without getting attached to them. By 'leaving the doors open,' he suggests that we should be open to our thoughts and emotions as they come and go, but advises against engaging with them too deeply, such as by nurturing or dwelling on them, symbolized by the metaphor of not serving them tea.
Themes
MindfulnessThoughtsDetachmentZenAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
In a meditation class, one might say, 'As Shunryu Suzuki wisely advised, leave your front door and your back door open to your thoughts.'
More from Shunryu Suzuki
All quotes βIf you take pride in your attainment or become discouraged because of your idealistic effort, your practice will confine you by a thick wall.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
No teaching could be more direct than just to sit down.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Everything is perfect, but there is a lot of room for improvement.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
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.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Similar quotes
Past certain ages or certain wisdoms it is very difficult to look with wonder; it is best done when one is a child; after that, and if you are lucky, you will find a bridge of childhood and walk across it.
Truman CapoteRead
Never stop being a kid, Richard. Never stop feeling and seeing and being excited with great things like air and engines and sounds of sunlight within you. Wear your little mask if you must to protect you from the world but if you let that kid disappear you are grown up and you are dead.
Richard BachRead
To hope till hope creates_x000D_ _x000D_ From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.
Percy Bysshe ShelleyRead
The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.
C. S. LewisRead
. . . your history is no less important to your survival than your ability to breathe. In the end, you can only determine whether to saturate your memories with pain or with perspective. Forgetting is not an option. I tell you the truth now: Pain was not God's plan for this life. It is a reality, but it is not a part of the plan.
Ted DekkerRead
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
Oscar WildeRead