‘Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: Informal talks on Zen Meditation and practice’ by Shunryu Suzuki

Finished 10:37 PM on 2/25/2017

As I’ve written about before, I’ve recently begun to dive into non-Western philosophy. After completing An Open Heart, which explains Tibetan Buddhism to a certain extent, I wanted to explore Zen Buddhism practice.

In doing so, I ended up checking out Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a book I’ve always wanted to read (I remember looking it up on early versions of Amazon) and coincidentally also happened to be a foundational text on the subject, specifically for Americans for whom it was written for.

The book is based on a series of talks/lectures Zen Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki gave in California in the second half of his life, after moving here from Japan. He was specifically impressed by the openness he found in Americans when looking at Zen practice, and wanted to cater his work towards this population which held no preconceived idea of what Zen ‘should’ be or how it should be practiced. He was a beloved teacher from what I can understand; one whom changed many lives.

The book itself is both light and dense. It’s written colloquially — you understand it’s being taken from talks, not written down on a scroll somewhere. However, the subject matter itself is rather dense, possibly compounded by the lack of dualism in English.

One topic that is touched on again and again, is one that I’ve struggled to full grip in the past — that of ‘emptiness’. To excerpt:

We say true existence comes from emptiness and goes back to emptiness. What appears from emptiness is true existence. We have to go through the gate of emptiness. This idea of existence is very difficult to explain. Many people these days have begun to feel, at least intellectually, the emptiness of the modern world, or the self-contradiction of their culture. In the past, for instance, the Japanese people had a firm confidence in the permanent existence of their culture and their traditional way of life, but since they lost the war, they have become very skeptical. Some people think this skeptical attitude is awful, but actually it is better than the old attitude.

As long as we have some definite idea of about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

Zen, in this context, is radically present — the entire book and philosophy is to ‘practice zazen’ by sitting and meditating each day, focusing on nothingness, where upon you’ll begin to understand the larger concepts that govern life, at least in some sense, later.

Recently I was talking with my wife about this concept of not dwelling on the non-present. She pointed out that it’s easy to understand to not dwell on the past — it’s already happened, there’s nothing you can do about it, good or bad — but it’s much more foreign to not dwell on the future.

Western culture imbues the value of forward-thinking from a young age — think about what you want to be when you grow up, work towards that goal, change the world as you see fit to do so — it’s radical in someways to say that one should not do that outright.

However, I think he’s trying to say that it’s still possible to do change the future; you just have to do so by focusing entirely on the present.

The best example I had heard that coincided with my understanding/interpretation of this concept was an interview with my hero Yvon Chouinard on How I Built This.

Yvon is a badass, who basically built an extremely profitable company that aligns with his values and is changing the world in it’s practices and sustainability.

He said something like to the effect that one should take a step forward, see if it feels good, and if it does, continue, if not, take a step back (I’m paraphrasing).

This is extremely simple, though in many ways, very hard to achieve.

I’ve been thinking on this pretty intensely recently, aligning some of the best decisions to my life when I did exactly that — acted in the present, moved in a direction that felt right, and iterated on that fact.

Another quote, I think goes along with my experience (and struggles) in studying eastern philosophy

I believe the more you know, the less you need…The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life, because everything thing in the world tells you to make it more complex.

Suzuki’s book, I feel, will likely sink in more over time (and possibly more reads). I may start trying to practice directly, as he recommends, instead of trying to achieve understanding intellectually first.

Again, the simple solution is often the most difficult — however, it also tends to have the greatest reward.