For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Treat every moment as your last. It is not preparation for something else.
Interpretation
Live in the present and appreciate each moment fully.
This quote by Shunryu Suzuki emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and being present in each moment. It encourages individuals to treat every experience with the significance it deserves, rather than merely viewing it as a step towards something else, thus fostering a deeper appreciation for life.
In practice
In a motivational speech about living life to the fullest, the speaker might use this quote to encourage the audience to value their current experiences.
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.
Nothing is harder than to accept oneself.
When our actions create discord in another person, we, ourselves, in this lifetime or another, will feel that discord. Likewise, if our actions create harmony and empowerment in another, we also come to feel that harmony and empowerment.
I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.
We need to learn to let go as easily as we grasp and we will find our hands full and our minds empty.
Only in quietness do we possess our own minds and discover the resources of the Inner Life.
I once heard a theologian remark that in the Gospels people approached Jesus with a question 183 times whereas he replied with a direct answer only three times. Instead, he responded with a different question, a story, or some other indirection. Evidently Jesus wants us to work out answers on our own, using the principles that he taught and lived.
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