We bowed nine times this morning. Bowing to Buddha is actually a kind of practice to get rid of our self-centered ideas—to give ourselves completely to Buddha. I mean to give our physical and intellectual life to Buddha because it is based on Buddha Nature. So even when we forget all about it, still we have Buddha Nature, and Buddha bows to Buddha. That is one meaning of bowing.
Photo by Sheldon A. Brody. Courtesy ICP, NY. Image from: tricycle.org.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-22 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.