When you work in your garden, there may be various insects. What will you do? If you understand what you are doing is bodhisattva activity, then sometimes you will kill. By killing insects, you will go to hell [laughs, laughter]. But it doesn’t matter. You will go to hell with insects [laughter, laughs]. You will have many friends. You are stealing our vegetables, so I have to kill you. But because of killing you I may go to hell. Because of stealing our vegetables, you may go to hell. Let’s go to hell [laughs, laughter]! That is bodhisattva precepts.
—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.
