For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
The mind we have when we practice zazen is the great mind: we don't try to see anything; we stop conceptual thinking; we stop emotional activity; we just sit. Whatever happens to us, we are not bothered. We just sit. It is like something happening in the great sky. Whatever kind of bird flies through it, the sky doesn't care. That is the mind transmitted from Buddha to us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and letting go of distractions during meditation.
In this quote, Shunryu Suzuki conveys that during zazen, or seated meditation, one should adopt a state of mind that is free from conceptual thought and emotional turbulence. By likening the mind to the vast sky, he illustrates that, like the sky, we should remain unaffected by the various thoughts and experiences that pass through our awareness, cultivating a serene and detached presence similar to that of the Buddha.
Themes
MindfulnessMeditationZazenBuddhismDetachmentPeace
In practice
Example use cases
During a meditation workshop, I quoted Suzuki to encourage participants to embrace stillness.
More from Shunryu Suzuki
All quotes →If 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
The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.
Nikola TeslaRead
As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.
Ernest HemingwayRead
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
William O. DouglasRead
Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else.
MenciusRead
In the long run all battles are lost, and so are all wars.
H. L. MenckenRead
Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
Helen KellerRead