103 Quotes by D.T. Suzuki

The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in view: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise. To go straight forward in order to crush the enemy is all that is necessary for him.

Zen teaches nothing; it merely enables us to wake up and become aware. It does not teach, it points.

If you have attained something, this is the surest proof that you have gone astray. Therefore, not to have is to have, silence is thunder, ignorance is enlightenment.

Zen has no business with ideas.

The mistake consists in our splitting into two what is really and absolutely one. Is not life one as we live it, which we cut to pieces by recklessly applying the murderous knife of intellectual surgery?

To be a good Zen Buddhist it is not enough to follow the teaching of its founder; we have to experience the Buddha’s experience.

Zen opens a man’s eyes to the greatest mystery as it is daily and hourly performed; it enlarges the heart to embrace eternity of time and infinity of space in its every palpitation; it makes us live in the world as if walking in the garden of Eden.

Not to be bound by rules, but to be creating one’s own rules-this is the kind of life which Zen is trying to have us live.

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?