Actually, to help others and to help yourself is the same, not different. To try not to have regrets in life is to help myself and to help others. It is true that we feel better when we help others more than when we help ourselves because we are so selfish [laughs]. Actually, we are pretty selfish. And we know to be selfish is not so good, so we always try not to be selfish. Your voice of conscience will tell you, “Don’t be selfish. That’s too much. You are too selfish.” So usually, we try not to be selfish.
First Page St. Gardeners, 1977 – Photo from Ginny Baker, uploaded to Barbara Lubanski-Wenger’s Flickr
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-27-B 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.