Shunryu Suzuki

The teaching

Taught from his talks as his students edited them, above all Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970).

Beginner's mind

Shunryu Suzuki's first teaching is the one that named his book. The beginner's mind is open to many possibilities; the expert's has closed on a few. A beginner comes to sitting fresh, ready to learn, with no idea of having attained anything; after years the same practice can become an accomplishment to defend, and then it is lost. The whole of practice, he says, is to keep the beginner's mind: not to know Zen, but to stay open to it.

The posture is the practice

Suzuki teaches that the posture itself is the realisation, not a means to it. He sits in the full lotus, the left foot on the right thigh and the right foot on the left, and points out that the two legs, though two, have become one: the posture expresses the oneness of duality, neither two nor one. The back is straight, the chin drawn in, the shoulders relaxed, and the hands make the cosmic mudra, the left hand resting on the right, the thumbs lightly touching, held against the body just below the navel. To take this posture fully is already to have the right state of mind, and there is nothing special to attain beyond it.

The forms of sitting he inherited from Dogen are taught in the branch called Zen. A body that cannot take the lotus sits in half lotus, kneels on a bench or sits on a chair; the knees are never forced.

The swinging door

When we sit, he says, the breath moves in and out like a swinging door. There is no one breathing, no inner world set against an outer one: the air comes in, the air goes out, and the mind follows its movement. What we call I is only that door, swinging as we breathe in and out. To sit is to let the breath be this simple.

A wide meadow

Control, in his teaching, does not come by holding tight. To control a sheep or a cow, give it a large, spacious meadow; to settle the mind, let it go where it will and watch it. Thoughts will come in and go out, and to try to stop them is to be bothered by them. Waves are the practice of the water: they are not something apart from the water, and the mind that holds its waves, which he calls big mind, is not disturbed by them. Small mind is the mind that clings to its own waves as if they were all there is.

The worst horse

An old sutra speaks of four horses: the excellent one runs at the shadow of the whip, the good one just before the whip touches it, the poor one when it feels the pain, and the worst only when the pain reaches the marrow of its bones. Everyone wants to be the best horse. Suzuki turns the story round: in Zen the worst horse may be the most valuable, because the one who has great difficulty in practice, who sits again and again with pain and restlessness, finds the marrow of Zen through that very difficulty. So the student does not judge the sitting good or bad. To sit, whatever happens, is the practice.

No gaining idea

To practise for a gain, for enlightenment, for calm, for a better self, is already to miss it. He asks the student to sit without a gaining idea, just to sit, and in every act to do the act completely: when bowing, only to bow; when sitting, only to sit; when eating, only to eat. An act done wholly, he says, burns like a good bonfire and leaves no trace behind it; an act done by halves leaves a residue of self, of regret and of comparison, which clutters the next.

Not always so

Everything changes, and nothing can be held fast. Without accepting that everything changes, he teaches, we cannot find composure; once we accept it, we find composure in the changing itself. The same holds for views. The secret of his school, he once said, lay in two words: not always so. However true a statement is, it is not always so, and the student holds every idea, even an idea about Zen, lightly, ready to let it go.

The one and the many

His lectures at Tassajara on the Sandokai, an old Chinese poem of his school, teach the meeting of the one and the many. San is the many, the things that differ; do is the one, their sameness; kai is their meeting, which he likened to a handshake. In the poem darkness is the one, where nothing is told apart, and light is the many, where each thing has its own place; the two go together like the front foot and the back foot in walking. Each thing, just as it is, is the whole of being, and the whole is nowhere except in the things.

The waterfall

Watching a great waterfall in Yosemite, he says, he saw that the water does not come down as one sheet but separates into many streams and drops, and each drop has a long, hard fall. Before it falls it is one with the river, and after its fall it is one with the river again. Our life is the drop's fall, and our fear of death is the drop's fear. To see that we come from the river and return to it is to find composure in life and in death, and that composure, in his telling, is nirvana.