Dogen Zenji said when you hit the mark, that is the same effort you have been making. Suppose after failing ninety-nine times, you hit the mark at the one-hundredth time. The meaning of “hit the mark” and the meaning of “missing the mark” should be the same. The difference is, now you hit the mark [laughs]. From a materialistic viewpoint, to miss the mark is not good at all. You should hit the mark. But from the meaning of actual practice, even though you miss it, the meaning of the practice is the same: to hit the mark or miss the mark is not different. That is our enlightenment.
Image generated by Google Gemini
—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.