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Thursday, May 14, 2026

Be Yourself

Bamboo cannot be a pine tree [laughs]. Bamboo is always valuable as bamboo. A mixture of bamboo and pine will not serve for anything because bamboo is straight and a pine tree is crooked. So, bamboo and pines are valuable in their own way. There is no need for us to be famous or to be useful. First of all, each one should be themself. Then we will find our world very convenient.

Image generated by Google Gemini

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-08-28-A 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.