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Enjoy Your Problems
21 Life-Changing Quotes From Shunryu Suzuki
I recently wrote a short article here on Medium entitled The Secret Of Zen which I ended with a playful yet powerful quote from Soto Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki. This was the quote:
“The secret of Soto Zen is just two words: not always so”
It’s been many years since I first came across this quote but it’s still one of my favourites. Suzuki Roshi is renowned for popularising Japanese Zen Buddhism in America. He arrived in San Francisco in 1959 to find America hungry for Zen’s rich teachings.
The Beat generation, in particular, resonated with Suzuki’s teachings and he attracted the likes of Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder, who eventually travelled to Japan and became a Zen monk himself.
Suzuki died in 1971, after establishing a spiritual legacy that spread all over the world. Twenty years later, I discovered his seminal work, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind which had a huge influence on me as a young man — an influence that continues to this day.
Anyway, after quoting Suzuki in that recent article, it got me thinking about some of his other teachings, which I decided to share here in the hope that they might have as profound an effect on you as they still have on me after all these years.
