Suzuki Philosophy Quotes

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, "Why is there so much suffering?" Suzuki Roshi replied, "No reason.

To have some deep feeling about Buddhism is not the point; we just do what we should do, like eating supper and going to bed. This is Buddhism.

I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color--something which exists before all forms and colors appear... No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.

Zen professes itself to be the spirit of Buddhism, but in fact it is the spirit of all religions and philosophies. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained, and a man lives as he ought to live.

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is.

Those who are attached only to the result of their effort will not have any chance to appreciate it, because the result will never come.

Going through all these quotations, it may be thought that the critics are justified in charging Zen with advocating a philosophy of pure negation, but nothing is so far from Zen as this criticism would imply. For Zen always aims at grasping the central fact of life, which can never be brought to the dissecting table of the intellect. To grasp this central fact of life, Zen is forced to propose a series of negations. Mere negation, however, is not the spirit of Zen, but as we are so accustomed to the dualistic way of thinking, this intellectual error must be cut at its root. Naturally Zen would proclaim, "Not this, not that, not anything." But we may insist upon asking Zen what it is that is left after all these denials, and the master will perhaps on such an occasion give us a slap in the face, exclaiming, "You fool, what is this?" Some may take this as only an excuse to get away from the dilemma, or as having no more meaning than a practical example of ill-breeding. But when the spirit of Zen is grasped in its purity, it will be seen what a real thing that slap is. For here is no negation, no affirmation, but a plain fact, a pure experience, the very foundation of our being and thought. All the quietness and emptiness one might desire in the midst of most active mentation lies therein. Do not be carried away by anything outward or conventional. Zen must be seized with bare hands, with no gloves on.

The most important things in our practice are our physical posture and our way of breathing. We are not so concerned about a deep understanding of Buddhism. As a philosophy, Buddhism is a very deep, wide, and firm system of thought, but Zen is not concerned about philosophical understanding. We emphasize practice. We should understand why our physical posture and breathing exercise are so important. Instead of having a deep understanding of the teaching, we need a strong confidence in our teaching, which says that originally we have Buddha nature. Our practice is based on this faith.

As Zen is a discipline and not a philosophy, it directly deals with life; and this is where Zen has developed its most characteristic features.

Analogously, the cultural appropriation of "Zen" in the popular culture of the West has often been as superficial as it has been enthusiastic. However, in Western universities these days the pendulum has swung in the other direction; the current academic trend is to use historical and philological scholarship to criticize the idealized spiritual and romantic image of Zen fashioned by earlier generations of writers. In erudite books with clever titles like Chan Insights and Oversights and Seeing Through Zen this this critical—and sometimes polemical—debunking is aimed not only at the ways in which authors like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts have presented Zen to Westerners; it is also aimed at the traditional self conceptions and self-presentations of the Zen tradition throughout its fifteen-hundred-year history in Asia.

Spanning from the turn of the twentieth century to the mid-1960s, [D. T.] Suzuki's work played a major role in the constitution of a Zen discourse in Japan and the West. In the wake of Suzuki, a significant contribution to the elaboration of a Zen philosophy was made by the so-called Kyoto School, which was founded by Suzuki's friend Nishida Kitaro (1870–1945). Despite their different intellectual itineraries, both Suzuki and Nishida were still speaking from within the discursive arena opened by Western Orientalism. That is to say, their description of Zen is in many respects an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries, and they relied on Christian categories even when rejecting them.

The guiding philosophy of the Suzuki method is that children should learn music as if it were a language, and that they should begin lessons as early as possible, ideally at the age of two and no later than five. Research by Oliver Sacks and others has confirmed this claim. After a certain age—somewhere between eight and twelve years old—the window for learning a spoken or musical language with native-level proficiency slams shut.

Suzuki: We must keep one thing always before our minds, . . . which is, that Buddhist thought is always the outcome of Buddhist life; that is, its logic, or psychology, or metaphysics cannot be understood adequately unless we realize that facts of Buddhist experience are at its basis and, therefore, that pure logic is not the key to the understanding of Buddhist philosophy.144

In Zen there are fortunately none of those marvellously incomprehensible words as in Indian cults. Neither does Zen play about with complicated Hatha-yoha techniques which delude the physiologically thinking European with the false hope that the spirit can e obtained by sitting and by breathing. On the contrary, Zen demands intelligence and will power, as do all the greater things which desire to become real. Personal experience is everything in Zen. To get the clearest and most efficient understanding of a thing, it must be experienced personally. In the working of the Eastern mind there is something calm, quiet, silent, undisturbable, which appears as if always looking into eternity. The spirit of Buddhism has left its highly metaphysical superstructure in order to become a practical discipline of life. The result is Zen. In Zen are found systematized, or rather crystallized, all the philosophy, religion and life itself of the Far-Eastern people, especially of the Japanese. If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way. This getting into the real nature of one's own mind or soul is the fundamental object of Zen Buddhism. The truth is, Zen is extremely elusive as far as its outward aspects are concerned. Unless you devote some years of earnest study to the understanding of its primary principles, it is not to be expected that you will begin to have a fair grasp of Zen. Anything that has the semblance of an external authority is rejected by Zen. Absolute faith is placed in a man's own inner being. For whatever authority there is in Zen, all comes from within. When Zen is thoroughly understood, absolute peace of mind is attained and a man lives as he ought to live. What more may we hope? What makes Zen unique as it is practiced in Japan is its systematic training of the mind. The great truth of Zen is possessed by everybody. Look into your own being and seek it not through others. The question: How can one always be with Buddha? called forth the following answer from a master: Have no stirrings in your mind, be perfectly serene toward the objective world. To remain thus all the time in absolute emptiness and calmness is the way to be with the Buddha. Zen thinks we are too much of slaves to words and logic. A quiet, self-confident and trustful existence of your own - this is the truth of Zen. The desire to possess is considered by Buddhism to be one of the worst passions with which mortals are apt to be obsessed. What in fact causes so much misery in the world is the universal impulse of acquisition.

We ourselves cannot put any magic spell on this world. The world is its own magic.

Paradoxically, we may argue that precisely because of his biases Suzuki can be considered representative of Zen—as a sectarian tradition. The appeal to the "pure" tradition, to the "essence" of Zen, is indeed a typical feature of the sectarian attitude. This attitude was already exemplified by Dogen, for whom true Zen stood above the Zen school. Just as Dogen refused to call his teaching "Zen," Suzuki claims that Zen is "neither a religion nor a philosophy" or better that it is "the spirit of all religion and philosophy." The assumption that there is an "essence" of Buddhism, a kind of perennial Dharma to which only "authentic" masters would have access, is to be rejected as ideologically suspect.

The relation between Christianity and Buddhism is compared by [D. T.] Suzuki to that between wine and tea: whereas tea is tasteless but stimulating, wine "first excitates and then inebriates" (Suzuki 1970, 273). This line of argument led Suzuki to the conclusion that Zen is neither a philosophy nor a metaphysics nor a religion, but it is, rather, "the spirit of all religion or philosophy." Suzuki went so far as to assert that "if there is a God, personal or impersonal, he or it must be with Zen and in Zen" (Suzuki 1969, 347). Implicit in such statements is an almost Protestant view of religion as a reality that has nothing to do with cults, dogmas, or collective beliefs, but rests on the "inner experience" of the individual. However, owing to the atypical character of such "mystical" experiences, their extreme rarity, and the Christian theology they often presuppose, it seems illegitimate to derive from them a general (if not always explicit) theory of religion, as Suzuki and Nishida, following William James, have done.

Suzuki also liked to compare Zen to Western philosophy, to Zen's advantage: "The philosopher according to whom cogito ergo sum is generally weak-minded. The Zen master has nothing to do with such quibbles" (Suzuki 1970, 408). We may also question the accuracy of his understanding of Western philosophy. If Meister Eckhart, despite (or because of) his undeniable spirituality, cannot be said to represent the entire Christian tradition, neither can the intellectualist strain emphasized by Suzuki be said to represent the entire Western philosophical tradition. From the pre-Socratics, Socrates and the Stoics, all the way to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, philosophy was a path of self-transformation, not merely the intellectual pastime that Suzuki describes.

Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis ; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance. In this respect Zen is quite chaotic if you choose to say so. Probably Zen followers may have sets of doctrines, but they have them on their own account, and for their own benefit; they do not owe the fact to Zen. Therefore, there are in Zen no sacred books or dogmatic tenets, nor are there any symbolic formulae through which an access might be gained into the signification of Zen. If I am asked, then, what Zen teaches, I would answer, Zen teaches nothing. Whatever teachings there are in Zen, they come out of one's own mind. We teach ourselves; Zen merely points the way. Unless this pointing is teaching, there is certainly nothing in Zen purposely set up as its cardinal doctrines or as its fundamental philosophy.