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Friday, April 25, 2025

To Practice Purely

To practice purely you start trying to do something to help others. But you may wonder whether you are doing something to help others or to help yourself [laughs]. It is very difficult to know which. I think you may suffer on this point a lot, as I did when I was young. Whatever I tried, continually doing something more and more, I felt I was losing my confidence…

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 70-08-03 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.