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Sunday, December 7, 2025

Beyond Intoxicating Liquor

Our buddha-nature should be beyond pure or impure. It means just to be aware of your true nature which is beyond pure or impure. To attach to purity is good, but buddha-nature is not pure or impure. If you understand this point, just to sit without thinking, without being bothered by something which will come. Even when you have something in your mind, don’t try to escape from it. Just sit. It will go. And you are beyond it. Those images come in and go out. This is so-called being beyond intoxicating liquor.

Image generated by Leonardo.ai

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-29-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.