Quote of the day.

Over the weekend, I picked up a copy of David Chadwick’s Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki.

I haven’t read it yet, and I’m going to be up to my eyebrows in the Iranian Revolution for the next week, but I did find one rather striking exchange while flipping through the book.

The setup for this is that a group of Suzuki’s students were sitting around with Suzuki talking about some book “about the meeting of East and West”. The students were making comparisons between East and West, and the West was getting the short end of the stick.

As conversation continued in this vein, Suzuki spoke up, obviously upset. “If you want to be a good Buddhist,” he said, “first you’re going to have to learn how to be a good Christian.” Then he got up and walked out.

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