When you become angry, you should just be angry. That’s all [laughter]. Don’t criticize yourself, and you cannot be always angry, you know. When you notice it, that’s too late. So, it may be better to be angry. And after you realize that was a mistake [laughs], you have to try not to be angry again. If you think you should not be angry, it means you are caught by precepts. “You should not be angry,” is not a precept, actually. When you keep it, it is a precept, but when you violate it, that is not a precept anymore. That is just a mistake. So, we do not talk about anger which came up already. That anger is psychological anger, not religious anger. Religious anger is about before we become angry. So, if you are really religious, you have no anger and you keep the precepts.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-29-C 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.
