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.
Given the sin of impiety through which they [the Romans] sinned against the divine nature [by idolatry], the punishment that led them to sin against their own nature followed.... I say, therefore, that since they changed into lies [by idolatry] the truth about God, He brought them to ignominious passions, that is, to sins against nature; not that God led them to evil, but only that he abandoned them to evil.
Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.
breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. to live, in fact, is to die.
And I hope I'm forgiven for Thug Livin when I die.
All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.
Once you accept your own death, all of a sudden you're free to live. You no longer care about your reputation. You no longer care except so far as your life can be used tactically to promote a cause you believe in.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.