Shunryu Suzuki - Zen Is Right Now: More Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

Here is a new collection of vignettes about Shunryu Suzuki. The first such publication, Zen Is Right Here, was put together a couple of decades ago after the biography of Suzuki, Crooked Cucumber, had been out a year. Throughout the ensuing years, Ive continued working in this area and have selected some more memories about him that stuck in peoples minds and that I thought you, dear reader, might appreciate.

Many of the vignettes herein are from exchanges that happened at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center during shosan, a formal question and answer ceremony with Suzuki. In interviews, emails, and conversations, Suzukis students have related shosan memoriesmore than from any other single source.

Shunryu Suzuki is often referred to as Suzuki Roshiroshi being an honorific meaning venerable old respected priest. He is best known for the books of his lecturesprincipally Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, but also Not Always So and Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness.

In case you dont know anything about Shunryu Suzuki or just need to have your memory refreshed on the basic background, I can do no better than to include some of the introduction from Zen Is Right Here. But first, a few words from his students.

Suzuki had a very human style. He never put on airs. He was traditional yet able to take a chance, which he sure did in San Francisco in the sixtiesgoing there and starting Tassajara and all. Ive never met anyone like Suzuki since.

Pauline Petchey

I remember he used to say that every teaching of every buddha was really for that moment at that place for those people or that person and that its imperfect. Its even imperfect at that momentbut its close to perfect.

Toni (Johansen) McCarty

Instead of putting emphasis on our small mind, on entertaining ourselves with thinking, Suzuki Roshi taught us to cultivate the big mind.

Jakusho Bill Kwong

Suzuki Roshi told us not to ask questions about our personal problems but to only talk about issues with our practice.

Sue Roberts

I experienced Suzuki Roshi in three ways. There was a kind of worn-out old man, a highly cultured man, and then the Zen master.

Steve Allen

I never saw Suzuki Roshi read from anything when he gave a lecture unless he was looking at a text he was speaking on. He just talked about what was on his mind at the moment, but there was this presence like the sutra come to life.

Bill Lane

Suzuki Roshi was the most remarkable person I ever met. No one else comes close. From Suzuki Roshi I learned that there could be a person like that. Others have mentioned how his movements flowed naturally, and how he sat down or walked. I remember this same quality in his responses to people. He responded very naturally and simply, but from a deep place. Watching him, I could begin to understand what it means to be egoless. He didnt seem to be dragging around heavy feelings the way most of us do, and yet he was bringing his life experience to bear on whatever happened.

Janet Sturgeon

He repeatedly told me that what weve got to do is to establish an American Zen. Hes Japanese, and so am I, but he wanted to establish an American Zen, whatever that turned out to be.

Seiyo Tsuji

A Brief Background from the Introduction to

Zen Is Right Here

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, a Soto Zen priest from Japan, arrived in San Francisco in 1959 at the age of fifty-five. He came to minister to a congregation of Japanese Americans at a temple on Bush Street in Japantown called Sokoji, Soto Zen Mission. His mission, however, was more than what his hosts had in mind for him. He brought his dream of introducing to the West the practice of the wisdom and enlightenment of the Buddha, as he had learned it from his teachers. To those who were attracted to the philosophy of Zen, he brought something to dozazen (Zen meditation) and Zen practice (the extension of zazen into daily life). A community of students soon formed around him; many of them moved into apartments in the neighborhood so that they could walk to Sokoji for zazen in the early mornings and evenings.

In 1964 a small group of students began to meet for daily zazen in Los Altos, south of San Francisco. Other groups formed in Mill Valley and Berkeley. Suzuki Roshi, as he was called, would join each one once a week, when he could. He lived exclusively at Sokoji until 1967, when Zen Mountain Center was established at Tassajara Springs, deep in the wilderness of Monterey County. This mountain retreat was not only the first Buddhist monastery for Westerners, it also broke from tradition in allowing men and women, married and single, to practice together. It is the setting of many of the accounts in this book. In November of 1969 Suzuki Roshi left Sokoji to found the City Center on Page Street in San Francisco as a residential Zen practice center. He died there in 1971.

To Suzuki Roshi, the heart of a Zen temple is the zendo, or zazen hall. There he would join his students in zazen (often just called sitting), formal meals, and services in which sutras, Buddhist scripture, were chanted. There he would also give lectures, sometimes called dharma talks. Dharma is a Sanskrit word for Buddhist teaching. Usually one or two forty-minute periods of zazen were held early in the morning and in the evening. Sometimes there would be sesshin, when zazen would continue from early morning till night for up to seven days, broken only by brief walking periods, services, meals, lectures, and short breaks. During sesshin Suzuki would conduct formal private interviews with his students, called dokusan. We called Suzukis wife Okusan, which is wife in Japanese.

Suzuki talked about the paradoxical dual structure of realityform and emptiness, relative and absolute, then and now. Echoing Dogen, the founder of Soto Zen, he taught that Zen practice is not preparation for something else; that the practice is enlightenment, not something that leads to it. Of course we have to consider the future and plan, but we ground ourselves in the immediate.