‘Student: You said that for an enlightened person it’s very true, and for a non-enlightened person it’s just talk.
Suzuki Roshi: What’s missing? Practice is missing. Only when you practice zazen hard is it true. At the same time, even though you practice hard, your practice will not always be complete. There may be a big gap between the truth and your understanding or actual experience. Your intellectual understanding may be high, but your practice may be low. To have an intellectual understanding is easy, but practicing with emotions is difficult because we easily stick to something emotionally. So we say, ‘It is easy to understand nothingness’, and ‘It is easy to destroy an intellectual understanding’. But to deal with emotional difficulty is as hard as splitting a lotus in two. Long strings will follow and you cannot get rid of them. The strings remain. With intellectual difficulty, it is as easy as breaking a stone in two. Nothing is left’. (from the Suzuki Roshi archives)
You may notice, if you click on the link, that this is the edited version that appeared in Branching Streams Flow In The Dark.
Shundo David Haye 