For Zen students, a weed is a treasure.
Shunryu SuzukiRead
When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything.
Interpretation
True self-awareness leads to a balance between independence and connection with the world.
This quote by Shunryu Suzuki suggests that when we fully embrace our true selves, we achieve a state of being that allows us to be both free and interconnected with the world around us. The metaphor of a 'swinging door' illustrates the idea that while we may act independently, we are always influenced by and dependent on our surroundings and relationships.
In practice
During a motivational speech about self-discovery.
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.
There's an opposite to dΓ©jΓ vu. They call it jamais vu. It's when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.
I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.
I am frankly sick and tired of the political preachers telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?
And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
Men are more compassionate/(nobler)/magnanimous/generous than God; for men forgive their dead, but God does not.
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