Sometimes when you see a saying written on a scroll, you may wonder what it means. For instance, “A cloud hangs on the mountain, and it is not calm.” “Not calm” means very calm. When the cloud is at the foot of the mountain, it expresses the same calm feeling, but in the poem it says, “not calm.” “Not calm” is a kind of rhetorical negation. Sometimes when we want to say something in a strong way, we put it in a negative form. “Isn’t it?” means “it is.” Instead of saying, “It is,” you say, “Isn’t it?” That is a stronger expression than “it is.”
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 66-01-21-BN 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.
