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Friday, December 26, 2025

Mental Functions

If you only study ethics, you will not be helped by ethics. That is a kind of study where you can write something interesting, but it is just to read, not actually to help yourself. You will be interested in it, that’s all. And after you know that, you may ask, “So what?” [Laughs.] If a philosopher says something, you may say, “And what is it for?” Buddhism says, “All the so-called mental functions, whatever they are, are not true functions of religion. They are functions of small mind, not functions of big mind.”

Image generated by Leonardo.ai

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-29-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.