If you do not know absolute serenity, even though you are in a calm, silent place, you will hear some noise, and you will feel scared even by a small mouse [laughs]. But if you have a stable, calm mind you will not be scared by even a thunderbolt. So, calmness is not something which exists outside of yourself. And it is not even a state of mind. It is something more than a state of mind. A state of mind is just temporal, but true calmness of your mind is unperturbable, and it exists forever.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 66-03-26-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.
