“Do not kill” means to extend our life activity. When you are lazy, or when you are not sincere enough in your practice you are killing Buddha [laughs]. Buddha will not manifest itself. That is actually to kill Buddha or to kill something. “Not to kill” means to do something with sincerity. That is the fundamental way of observing precepts. So, precepts observation is to do something with your utmost effort. That is how you observe those ten prohibitory precepts.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 66-01-21-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.
