D. T. Suzuki Quotes on Knowledge
D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), the principal modern Japanese exponent of Zen Buddhism in the Anglophone world, gave the twentieth-century Western reception of Mahāyāna Buddhism its founding interpretive framework through works such as the three series of Essays in Zen Buddhism (1927, 1933, 1934) and the late Zen and Japanese Culture (1959). The framework treats the highest cognitive realization (satori, kenshō) as the non-discursive recognition of the suchness of things prior to the subject-object division through which the conceptual intellect operates, with the consequent case that prajñā (transcendent wisdom) is a genuine cognitive faculty distinct from the vijñāna (discriminative consciousness) the European philosophical tradition had taken to be the only cognitive mode.
Quotes
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Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“Zen, in its essence, is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being.”
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Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“If you have a glass full of liquid, you can discourse forever on its qualities, but until you drink it, you cannot know its taste.”
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Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“What we have to do is to keep on questioning what we are doing.”
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“Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro (1907). "The Dharmakâya" . Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism . pp. 217–218.”
We may sometimes ignore the claims of reason and rest satisfied, though usually unconsciously, with assertions which are conflicting when critically examined, but we cannot disregard by any means those of the religious sentiment which finds satisfaction only in the very fact of things. If it ever harbored some flagrant contradiction in the name of faith, it was because its ever-pressing demands ha -
“Deliverance or enlightenment, therefore, consists of making every sentient being open his mental eye to this fact. It is not his ego-soul that makes him think, feel, desire, or aspire, but the Dharmakaya itself in the form of Bodhicitta or “wisdom-heart” which constitutes his ethical and religious being. Abandon the thought of egoism, and return to the universal source of love and wisdom, and we are released from the bond of evil karma, we are enlightened as to the reason of existence, we are Buddhas.”
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