Bodhidharma, the first Chinese patriarch, said, “If you want to see a fish, you have to watch water.” If you want to see a fish, you have to watch water before you’ll see any fish. If you want to see buddha-nature, you have to see your small mind before you see buddha-nature. Actually, when you see water, there is true fish. Here, by “fish” he meant “true nature.” If you want to see true nature, when you see the water, there is true nature. The true nature is watching water. You are watching water. At the same time, true nature is watching water.
Image generated by Google Gemini
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-07-30-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.
