D. T. Suzuki Quotes on Mind
D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966) — the Japanese Buddhist scholar whose long career at Otani University, Columbia, and on a steady international lecture circuit made him the principal twentieth-century interpreter of Zen for Western audiences — gave the Western reception of East Asian philosophy of mind its founding works. Essays in Zen Buddhism (three volumes, 1927–34), An Introduction to Zen Buddhism (1934), and Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957) develop the Rinzai analysis of consciousness through the koan practice as a discipline of breaking through discriminating thought to the immediate suchness (tathata) of mind in its enlightened condition. The framework — controversial within later academic Buddhology for its distinctively modernist construction of Zen — shaped the postwar American reception of Buddhism through Thomas Merton, Erich Fromm, and the broader Beat and counterculture engagement with Asian thought.
Quotes
-
Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“Zen, in its essence, is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being.”
-
Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“We are too self-conscious, too logical, and we lose touch with the underlying reality of our own being.”
-
Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“What we have to do is to keep on questioning what we are doing.”
-
Attributed to D. T. Suzuki:
“The moon stays bright when it does not avoid the clouds.”
-
“Enlightenment is like everyday consciousness but two inches above the ground.”
As quoted in Root (2001) [ specific citation needed ] -
“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 had to be met with even at the expense of reason.”
Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro (1907). "The Dharmakâya" . Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism . pp. 217–218. -
“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.”
p 8 -
“The ranges of the Himalayas may stir in us the feeling of sublime awe; the waves of the Pacific may suggest something of infinity. But when one’s mind is poetically or mystically or religiously opened, one feels as Basho did that even in every blade of wild grass there is something really transcending all venal, base human feelings, which lifts one to a realm equal in its splendor to that of the Pure Land.”
Wikiquote -
“The head is conscious while the abdomen is unconscious. When the master tells his disciples to "think" with the lower part of the body, he means that the koan is to be taken down to the unconscious and not to the conscious field of consciousness.”
Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis(1960)