For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale.
Interpretation
The 'I' is not a fixed entity but a transient experience shaped by our breath and presence.
In this quote, Shunryu Suzuki highlights the transient nature of the self, suggesting that our identity is fluid and ever-changing, much like the ebb and flow of our breath. The idea that 'I' is likened to a swinging door emphasizes that our sense of self is influenced by external and internal factors, and is not a permanent fixture but rather a dynamic experience that fluctuates with each moment.
In practice
In a meditation retreat, this quote can be used to encourage participants to reflect on the nature of their identity.
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.
Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster, the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water, And the expensive ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
I do not hesitate to proclaim before you and before the world that all human life-from the moment of conception and through all subsequent stages-is sacred, because human life is created in the image and likeness of God.
We must cultivate and defend particularity, individuality, and irregularity-life. Human beings do not have a future in the collectivism of bureaucratic states or in the mass society created by capitalism. Every system, by virtue as much of its abstract nature as of its pretension to totality, is the enemy of life. As a forgotten Spanish poet, José Moreno Villa, put it with melancholy wit: "I have discovered in symmetry the root of much iniquity."
In this world, all--men, women, and kings--must live for the present. We can only live for the future for God
O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell, Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings
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