Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

One morning when we were all sitting zazen, Suzuki Roshi gave a brief impromptu talk in which he said, “Each of you is perfect the way you are . . . and you can use a little improvement.”

Once I asked Suzuki Roshi, “What is Nirvana?”

He replied: “Seeing one thing through to the end.”

One day at Tassajara, Suzuki Roshi and a group of students took some tools and walked up a hot, dusty trail to work on a project. When they got to the top, they discovered that they had forgotten a shovel, and the students began a discussion about who should return to get it. After the discussion had ended, they realized that Roshi wasn’t there. He was already halfway down the mountain trail, on his way to pick up the shovel.

One day I complained to Suzuki Roshi about the people I was working with.

He listened intently. Finally, he said, “If you want to see virtue, you have to have a calm mind.”

A student asked in dokusan, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?”

Suzuki Roshi answered, “It doesn’t matter.”

It was my first sesshin and, before the first day was over, I was convinced I couldn’t make it. My husband’s turn for dokusan came that afternoon. He asked Suzuki Roshi to see me instead.

“This is all a mistake,” I told Roshi. “I can’t do this; I just came to be with my husband.”

“There is no mistake,” he insisted. “You may leave, of course, but there’s no place to go.”

One day a student was in the hall at Sokoji when Suzuki Roshi approached him.

“Just to be alive is enough,” Suzuki said, and with that, he turned around and walked away.

One night after a dharma talk, I asked Suzuki Roshi a question about life and death. The answer he gave made my fear of death, for that moment, pop like a bubble.

He looked at me and said, “You will always exist in the universe in some form.”

Once in a lecture, Suzuki Roshi said, “We should practice zazen like someone who is dying. For him, there is nothing to rely on. When you reach this kind of understanding, you will not be fooled by anything.”

A student at Tassajara sat facing Suzuki Roshi on a tatami mat in his room. The student said he couldn’t stop snacking in the kitchen and asked what he should do.

Suzuki reached under his table. “Here, have some jelly beans,” he said.

A student, filled with emotion and crying, implored, “Why is there so much suffering?”

Suzuki Roshi replied, “No reason.”

At a question session with Suzuki Roshi at Sokoji, a young man asked, “What should a Zen practitioner do with his spare time?”

Suzuki at first looked perplexed and repeated the phrase, “Spare time?” He repeated it again and then began to laugh uproariously.

A student of Suzuki Roshi’s, a publisher of Beat poetry, saw his teacher of a year and a half in a private interview. He said that he couldn’t continue, that every time he sat zazen he started to cry. “I can’t take it,” he said. “I’m leaving. I can’t be here anymore.”

Suzuki didn’t tell him to stay. He merely said, “You try and you try and you fail, and then you go deeper.”

I was driving Suzuki Roshi and a fellow student back to Sokoji from the Mill Valley Zendo. My friend, who was in the backseat, his Camel cigarettes in his shirt pocket, asked Suzuki a question about Zen.

“Zen is hard,” Suzuki said. “It’s at least as hard as quitting smoking.”

A well-known Japanese Rinzai Zen master dropped by Sokoji to meet Suzuki Roshi. After they chanted a sutra together, the visiting priest asked to see a sutra book on the altar. He looked at it, then suddenly exploded, stamping his foot on the floor and shouting, “This is not Zen!” He tore the book in two and threw it on the floor.

Suzuki squatted down and picked up the pieces. “Oh, this sutra book was donated to the temple when there was a memorial service for an old woman from a different sect,” he said. “We accept everything here. We chant everything. We eat everything.” For a moment the guest still looked angry, then Suzuki said, “Let’s go have some tea.” A friendship began that continued as long as they were both alive.

Once a student asked Suzuki Roshi, “Why do you have forty-minute zazen periods, when most Zen teachers in America have only thirty? My legs really hurt when I sit for forty minutes. Won’t you consider having thirty-minute periods, at least in sesshin?”

Suzuki replied, “That’s very interesting. I’ve been thinking that we should have fifty-minute periods.” After a pregnant pause, he added, “But maybe we can compromise. Let’s make it forty minutes.”

I was struggling with questions about the meaning, if any, of life and death, and I told Suzuki Roshi that I was engaged in an existential philosophical quest. I told him how absorbing and exciting it was for me and asked him if I was on the right track.

He said, “There is no end to that kind of search.”

One day in a lecture Suzuki Roshi said, “When you see one leaf falling, you may say, Oh, autumn is here! One leaf is not just one leaf; it means the whole autumn. Here you already understand the all-pervading power of your practice. Your practice covers everything.”

A student asked, “Is enlightenment a complete remedy?”

Suzuki Roshi replied, “No.”

During a break in one of the early sesshins at Sokoji, a student returning to his seat early straightened a picture on the wall before he sat down on his cushion. Only he and Suzuki Roshi were in the zendo at the time. After a moment, Suzuki got up to leave the room. He walked down the aisle, stopped at the picture, returned it to its crooked position, and continued out the door.

While serving as Suzuki Roshi’s attendant, I arrived at his cabin at Tassajara and found him in his underwear scrubbing out the toilet. “I should be doing that,” I said, with some embarrassment.

“Sit down and have some tea,” he answered.

A flamboyant young man with long hair and beads around his neck had been trying hard to practice Zen at Sokoji while continuing his hippie lifestyle. One day he asked Suzuki Roshi a question about marijuana and Zen to which Suzuki answered, “Maybe you smoke too much marijuana.”

“Okay,” the fellow said, “I’ll quit. You’re the boss.”

“No!” Suzuki said, “You’re the boss!”

A student asked, “Does a Zen master suffer in a different way than his students suffer?”

Suzuki answered, “In the same way. If not, I don’t think he is good enough.”

One day while editing a transcription of Suzuki Roshi’s first lecture on the Sandokai, I came upon the phrase “things as it is.” I asked him if perhaps he had not meant to say “things as they are,” which I thought to be proper syntax.

“No,” he said, “what I meant is ‘things as it is.’”

One morning at the Haiku Zendo in Los Altos, a group was sitting around the breakfast table drinking coffee, and a student asked Suzuki Roshi, “What is hell?”

“Hell is having to read aloud in English,” he answered.

During his first dokusan, a student said he couldn’t stop thinking during meditation.

Suzuki Roshi asked, “Is there some problem with thinking?”

Suzuki Roshi’s answer to my “What is enlightenment?” question was to laugh and say, “You see! It’s the monkey mind! Trying to understand enlightenment with the monkey mind!”

Once in a lecture Suzuki Roshi said, “Hell is not punishment, it’s training.”

On the fourth day of sesshin as we sat with our painful legs, aching backs, hopes, and doubts about whether it was worth it, Suzuki Roshi began his talk by saying slowly, “The problems you are now experiencing . . .”

“Will go away,” we were sure he was going to say.

“. . . will continue for the rest of your life,” he concluded.

The way he said it, we all laughed.

Suzuki Roshi said during a talk that some of us wanted to be Zen masters, and that this was very foolish. He said that he wished he was like us, just starting out. “Maybe you think you are green apples hanging on a tree, waiting to ripen so that you can be Buddhas,” he said, “but I think you are already ripe, perfect Buddhas now, ready to be picked.”

One day during a tea break a student standing next to Suzuki Roshi asked, “So what do you think about all of us crazy Zen students?”

Roshi said, “I think you’re all enlightened until you open your mouth.”

Next to the temple on Bush Street was a grocery store run by an old woman. Suzuki Roshi used to buy the old vegetables there. Finally one day the woman said, “Here are some fresh ones. Why don’t you take them?”

“The fresh ones will be bought anyway,” he answered her.

One morning in the zendo as we were all silently sitting zazen, Suzuki Roshi said, “Don’t move. Just die over and over. Don’t anticipate. Nothing can save you now, because this is your last moment. Not even enlightenment will help you now, because you have no other moments. With no future, be true to yourself—and don’t move.”

“When you prescribed a year at this place for me, you told me I would find great joy,” a student said to Suzuki Roshi, as they sat sipping tea in Suzuki’s cabin at Tassajara. “To find that great joy, I will first have to lose the will to live, won’t I, Roshi?”

“Yes,” he said, “but without gaining a will to die.”

My family and I returned to San Francisco after being away from the Zen Center for a year. When I saw Roshi I said, “I think I got a little lost.”

He replied, “You can never get lost.”

During one sesshin at Tassajara it was very cold in the unheated zendo. After a lecture, a student said, “Roshi, I thought you said that when it got cold we’d figure out how to stay warm within our zazen.”

Suzuki Roshi answered, “It’s just not cold enough yet.”

“Suzuki Roshi, I’ve been listening to your lectures for years,” a student said during the question and answer time following a lecture, “but I just don’t understand. Could you just please put it in a nutshell? Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase?”

Everyone laughed. Suzuki laughed.

“Everything changes,” he said. Then he asked for another question.

During a break on the fourth day of a sesshin at Tassajara, I stood on the bridge overlooking the creek. It was a beautiful fall day. The leaves on the trees were all vibrating and alive, and I could see energy coursing through everything.

Suzuki Roshi came by, looked in my eyes, and said, “Stay exactly like that.”

A student told Suzuki about an experience in which he had dissolved into amazing spaciousness.

“Yes, you could call that enlightenment,” Suzuki said, “but it’s best to forget about it. And how’s your work coming?”

My friend and I were summer guests at Tassajara. I was initiating him into the rigors of the hot baths, putting on the act of a drill instructor. The only other person in the water was a small man whose feet almost didn’t touch bottom. He joined in our routine until we were all laughing.

Later we entered the stream, which was full of hungry, inch-long fish. Every few seconds one of them would take a nibble. Later that evening there was a lecture by the abbot, Suzuki Roshi, whom I recognized as the little man from the baths. In his talk he said that Zen students should be like feeding fish in their practice, nothing more, and he made his mouth and hand move like the mouths of the small fish.

Now and then Suzuki Roshi would make this point: “In the Lotus Sutra, Buddha says to light up one corner—not the whole world. Just make it clear where you are.”

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