To polish a tile. That is our practice. Even though you polish it, a tile is a tile [laughs]. But to polish is our practice. It doesn’t matter whether it will make a mirror or not. To polish it is our practice, and that is the goal—that is enlightenment. The effort to polish is based on our true nature. Our true nature makes us polish it. That is the point.
Drawing by Stan White
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-08-28-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.
