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Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Sincere Effort

We should be very grateful for the precepts. If you think the precepts will be a bandage for your life, or precepts are the rules for your life, that is a big misunderstanding. It means you are not sincere enough. You don’t know yourself, and you do not make enough effort to be a Buddhist. When you become a Buddhist, you will find the true meaning of those 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.