“Where are you from?” “Who are you?”
“I don’t know” is right. He may have some merit, but that is just merit, and not he himself. This kind of question was discussed by many teachers, even before Bodhidharma came to China. The Sanron school classifies our teaching in two: the first principle, and the second principle. The second principle is the principle which we can study and talk about intellectually. The first one is something which we cannot talk about. If we talk about it, it is already the second principle.
Brushwork by Mariangeles Soto
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 68-07-23 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.
