There was a famous novelist, Toson Shimazaki. And in the opening page of a book he said, “If you want to raise your mind, you should raise your body.” I was very interested, and very much encouraged by his words when I was quite young. At that time, I couldn’t go to college because I had to help my master, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go, [laughs] but I had to help him. So sometimes I did not know what to do. And when I read those two lines, “If you want to raise your mind, you should raise your body,” I knew that was why he went abroad. But I thought that is very good, so I must do something. If I thought, “What shall I do?” I would suffer more. So, I must work hard: cooking or cleaning or sweeping the garden. So, I stopped thinking about myself, and I worked and worked and worked. And that helped me very much.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-28-D 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.
