When our mind becomes demanding or when we are longing for something, we will violate our precepts not to kill, not to be immoral, not to steal, not to tell a lie, and so on. Those acts are based on our greedy mind. When our mind is satisfied, we keep our precepts. When we ourselves are always self-satisfied, we have our original beauty, and we can practice goodness, and we are always true to ourselves.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-11-11 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.