Friday, April 26, 2024 Text is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence.

D. T. Suzuki

« All quotes from this author
 

It was not merely a sense of mission… or even scholarly drive which provided Suzuki Sensei with his real internal motivation. I believe that behind his activities resided a religious Awakening. As a youth, under the guidance of Zen Master Soyen Shaku, he had become deeply realized through penetrating into the root-source of the universe of life-and-death. His "motivation" derived from no other than this realization… This Awakening functioned within Suzuki Sensei as an overwhelming Buddhist spirit of 'vow', aimed at bringing everyone to awaken to the same Reality. His scholarly study of Buddhism was undertaken in order to further this work, it was not the other way around.
--
Abe Masao. Prof. Abe was said to have succeeded to the rôle of Suzuki following his death. Christopher Ives, "Introduction" at xiii-xix, xiii, to The Emptying God. A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation (New York: Orbis Press 1990), edited by John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives.

 
D. T. Suzuki

» D. T. Suzuki - all quotes »



Tags: D. T. Suzuki Quotes, Authors starting by S


Similar quotes

 

May we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleeping is to waking? May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what? And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?

 
Miguel de Unamuno
 

Suzuki's works on Zen Buddhism are among the best contributions to the knowledge of living Buddhism… We cannot be sufficiently grateful to the author, first for the fact of his having brought Zen closer to Western understanding, and secondly for the manner in which he has achieved this task.

 
D. T. Suzuki
 

If you say to someone who has ears to hear: "What you are doing to me is not just," you may touch and awaken at its source the spirit of attention and love. But it is not the same with words like, "I have the right..." or "you have no right to..." They evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention.

 
Simone Weil
 

Ikenobo Sen'o remarked on another occasion (this too is in his Sayings) that "the mountains and strands should appear in their own forms". Bringing a new spirit into his school of flower arranging, therefore, he found "flowers" in broken vessels and withered branches, and in them too the enlightenment that comes from flowers. "The ancients arranged flowers and pursued enlightenment." Here we see awakening to the heart of the Japanese spirit, under the influence of Zen. And in it too, perhaps, is the heart of a man living in the devastation of long civil wars.

 
Yasunari Kawabata
 

Francisco, an experimental and theoretical biologist, studied what he termed "emergent selves" or "virtual identities." His was an immanent view of reality, based on metaphors derived from self-organization and Buddhist-inspired epistemology rather than on those derived from engineering and information science.

 
Francisco Varela
© 2009–2013Quotes Privacy Policy | Contact