When you sit, you say something occurred in your mind which is not so good. Some image came. Something covered your wisdom or buddha-nature. When you say so, you have the idea of clearness because you think you have to keep your mind clear of various images which will come to you. This is how you understand it, but Dogen Zenji says: Don’t even try to clear up your mind, even though you have something there. Don’t want to be pure. If you want to be pure, it means you have attached to purity. That is also not so good. Don’t attach to purity or impurity.
Image generated by Google Gemini
—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.
