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.
Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the Maker of the world, but degenerates once it gets into the hands of man
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.
The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.
You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father.
Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.
Our allegiance is to the principles always, and not to the persons. Persons are but the embodiments, the illustrations of the principles. If the principles are there, the persons will come by the thousands and millions. If the principle is safe, persons like Buddha will be born by the hundreds and thousands. But if the principle is lost and forgotten and the whole of national life tries to cling round a so-called historical person, woe unto that religion, danger unto that religion!
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