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Saturday, February 21, 2026

Criticize

As long as religions have absolute dogma, that is: “You should not do so. If you do so, you will be punished.” This is nearly the same as ethics. As long as the teaching is like this, when you want to study you cannot go further. But Buddhism allows discussing further. You can criticize more. There is no barrier. So, that is why people are interested in Buddhism because we have no borderline for religion.

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-30-C 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.