D T Suzuki Quotes
D T Suzuki (1870-1966), Japanese author and scholar, was instrumental in introducing Zen Buddhism to the Western world. His numerous books and essays made Buddhist concepts accessible to Western audiences and influenced many artists and intellectuals.
What Zen wants us to do is to acquire an entirely new point of view whereby to look into the mysteries of life and the secrets of nature.
D T Suzuki
The practice of Zen is forgetting the self in the act of uniting with something.
D T Suzuki
Life is an art, and like perfect art it should be self-forgetting.
D T Suzuki
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.
D T Suzuki
The real purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.
D T Suzuki
Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.
D T Suzuki
Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.
D T Suzuki
Zen is a way of life, not a theory or a piece of knowledge to be stored away in our minds.
D T Suzuki
The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand; I take a book from the other side of the desk; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond the neighboring wood: all these I do in Zen.
D T Suzuki
In Zen there must be satori; there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection and lays down the foundation for a new life.
D T Suzuki
Zen is not necessarily against words, but it is well aware of their limitations.
D T Suzuki
The role of Zen is neither to stand above life nor to run away from it, but to face it with a spirit of determination.
D T Suzuki
Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities.
D T Suzuki
Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.
D T Suzuki
When the mind is ready to understand, the truth will come to meet it.
D T Suzuki
Zen proposes its solution by directly appealing to facts of personal experience and not to book-knowledge.
D T Suzuki
To live – is that not enough? To love – is that not everything?
D T Suzuki
The truth of Zen is the truth of life, and life means to live, to move, to act, not merely to reflect.
D T Suzuki
Who would then deny that when I am sipping tea in my tearoom I am swallowing the whole universe with it and that this very moment of my lifting the bowl to my lips is eternity itself transcending time and space?
D T Suzuki