You may say, “This is a short temporal activity,” and “This is a long period of practice,” but actually we don’t know which is longer and which is shorter. You cannot compare the two—they have the same value, same quality. So, you cannot discriminate which is good or bad—it is the same thing. Whether or not you understand it, each activity is the expression of our true nature. It isn’t different from zazen practice in its true sense.
—cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 66-02-18 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.
