If there is no religion, you will make an effort to utilize morality, or to make some excuse for what you do. If there is no religion, that will be your effort. Not pure enough, you know. You are just making excuses because our constitution says, “Oh, this is good, and this is bad.” But when it is not convenient, you will not say anything [laughs, laughter]. That is morality.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-26-D 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.
