For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an enlightened person. There is only enlightened activity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that enlightenment is not about the person but rather about the actions they take.
Shunryu Suzuki's quote suggests that enlightenment should not be viewed as a status or an identity that one possesses; instead, it is reflected in one's actions and behaviors. This perspective encourages individuals to focus on living mindfully and engaging in activities that embody enlightened principles, rather than striving for a label of being 'enlightened'.
In practice
During a meditation session, this quote could be shared to emphasize the importance of mindful actions.
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.
Since there is no one else to praise me, I will praise myself -- will say that I have never tampered with a single tooth in my thought machine, such as it is. There are teeth missing, God knows -- some I was born without, teeth that will never grow. And other teeth have been stripped by the clutchless shifts of history -- But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, 'This fact I can do without.
The complexity of the connection between the world of perception and the world of physics does not preclude that such a connection can be shown to exist at any time.
No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.
Half the people in Hollywood are dying to be discovered and the other half are afraid they will be.
After all Death is a Symbol that there was Life.
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
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