For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
Because we cannot accept the truth of transience, we suffer.
Interpretation
Acceptance of life's impermanence is essential to alleviate suffering.
Shunryu Suzuki's quote highlights the human struggle with the concept of transience, the idea that all things, including life itself, are temporary. By resisting the truth of impermanence, we create unnecessary suffering for ourselves; embracing this reality allows us to find peace and a deeper understanding of existence.
In practice
During a mindfulness seminar, this quote can illustrate the importance of accepting change.
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 mean, after all, you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's sort of a bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?
It is left... to the juries, if they think the permanent judges are under any bias whatever in any cause, to take on themselves to judge the law as well as the fact. They never exercise this power but when they suspect partiality in the judges; and by the exercise of this power they have been the firmest bulwarks of English liberty.
If everybody likes you, you're pretty dull.
This thing called nationalism is a treasure that a country uses to try to develop and a nationality uses to try to survive. China has lost this treasure.
There seem to be but three ways for a nation to acquire wealth. The first is by war, as the Romans did, in plundering their conquered neighbors. This is robbery. The second by commerce, which is generally cheating. The third by agriculture, the only honest way, wherein man receives a real increase of the seed thrown into the ground, in a kind of continual miracle, wrought by the hand of God in his favor, as a reward for his innocent life and his virtuous industry.
You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.
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