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.