For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?" Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.
Interpretation
Suffering exists without a specific reason, and it is a part of the human experience.
In this quote, Shunryu Suzuki addresses the profound question of suffering posed by a student. His response, 'No reason,' suggests that suffering is an inherent aspect of life, which cannot always be explained or understood rationally. This acknowledgment of the unpredictable and sometimes arbitrary nature of suffering encourages acceptance, urging individuals to confront their pain without seeking justification or logical reasoning.
In practice
During a discussion on mental health awareness, one might quote this to emphasize the acceptance of suffering.
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.
I don't know about Heaven or Hell, but I do know that we are visited all the time by the spirits of those who affected us in life.
We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.
It is not all of life to live, nor yet all of death to die. For life and death are one, and only those who will consider the experience as one may come to understand or comprehend what peace indeed means.
Randolph," he said, "were you ever as young as me?" And Randolph said: "I was never so old.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.