Small Patience, Big Patience

Small patience is like even though you have physical suffering or mental suffering, to be patient is small patience. And big patience is something different from to be patient with your physical or mental distress or suffering. That is small patience, but big patience is to be patient about not knowing anything, or for not to achieve anything. This is big patience. Just to sit is big patience for not achieving anything [laughs]. Just to sit. And to repeat the same thing over and over again, day after day, just to repeat things over and over.

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—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-28-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.