Before Buddhism was known to the West, by religion you meant Christianity. So, it’s no wonder that the Western idea of religion is quite different from our idea of religion. Our idea of religion covers everything, all of human culture. So, it is impossible to study by a scientific way, because science takes some viewpoint. But religion can take viewpoints of science, or natural science, or cultural science, or ethics, or philosophy, or logic, so studying from a fixed standpoint cannot understand what religion is because it covers everything.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-27-A as found on shunryusuzuki.com, edited by PF. These posts are also on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram. We are continually working on improving the quality of transcriptions of Suzuki's lectures. After a new "verbatim transcript" is made, we create a minimally edited version which is more readable. See the most recently completed transcripts at shunryusuzuki.com/n.
