In Zen “to help others” means we do not take it in a dualistic sense. “To help others” means to think of others as a part of you. Not “others” —not “you, yourself.” You think to help others is to help someone, some imperfect person helps people. But when we say, “to help others” in our sense, it means to consider people a part of you, or it is like your hands or your body. So, in this sense we help others.
Photo by L. S. Sleven, courtesy of the Monterey County Public Library, from The Double Cone Quarterly
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-30-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.
