Zen is not a system of dhyana as practised in India and by other Buddhist schools in China. It is a way of life.
Philosophers
D. T. Suzuki
Born in 1870 in Kanazawa, Japan, D. T. Suzuki was the Buddhist scholar who brought Zen to the English-speaking world and laid the foundation for Western understanding of Eastern philosophy. His lectures at Columbia University in the 1950s electrified Beat Generation writers and avant-garde artists, deeply embedding a Zen worldview in the counterculture of the late 20th century. He authored roughly 100 books, 23 in English, serving as an intellectual bridge between East and West.
View this figure's profile
D. T. Suzuki's Other Quotes
The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows.
Unless it grows out of yourself no knowledge is really yours, it is only a borrowed plumage.
What is the meaning of the First Patriarch's coming from the West? The cypress tree in the garden.
The more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with the deepening of your character you read the more penetratingly into the secrets of life.
Related Quotes
The unexamined life is not worth living.
-- Socrates
It is not living that matters, but living rightly.
-- Socrates
Live unknown.
-- Epicurus
He who would be tranquil should not undertake too many things, either private or public.
-- Democritus
The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows.
-- D. T. Suzuki
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
-- Michel Foucault