“When we are in defilement, we should attain composure,” Dogen says. Composure will be experienced only in our defilement. This point is very, very important. By continuing this kind of effort, you can improve yourself. Even though it is little by little, you can improve yourself. But if you only try to attain something, or to make some contrivance to acquire something, you cannot work on it properly because you have no art of technique [laughs]. You lose yourself in your effort. That is why you cannot achieve anything, and you just suffer in your difficulties. But if you find out, if you do it in an appropriate way, based on your inmost nature, whatever you do, even if it is not perfect, you can achieve it little by little. You can make some progress.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-08-26 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.
