We say you cannot plant any plants on a stone [laughs]. You should be like a stone. No good or evil can grow on buddha-nature. It is so hard and so strict. Good or bad is delusion. Any delusion can grow on your spirit. Or we say it is impossible to thrust a needle into iron. This kind of spirit is wanted when you practice our practice. Then little by little you will make progress.
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.
