Tag Archives: Shunryu Suzuki

One small room

You need one small room for yourself. This is very true: when you can really find yourself in a small room, then there is you yourself, and the whole universe is there, and the whole universe makes sense to you. Without your one small room, the whole universe doesn’t make any sense. So what you need now is a small room, and what you will need after your death is a small stone. That is the actual reality, which is always true for everyone.

Shunryu Suzuki, Becoming Yourself: Teachings on the Zen Way of Life p.32

I have grown increasingly to love my own small room. It has become soaked, somehow, at least in my own feelings, with the hours I have spent there, and the changes I have seen in myself and in the seasons – in the years now, in fact – the trees growing and changing, generations of blackbirds coming and going across the lawn.

Strangely, though, I’ve also come to notice that the room travels with me. If I am aware enough of where I am, of the light moving across the floor, my own breathing in its little tides and intervals, then my own little room can be in a hotel, even a train seat or in an airport among all the other displaced travellers who wait with me, Stillness isn’t a thing you need to find so much as that you just need to step into, opening the door and closing it behind you gently.

Perhaps the strangest thing I have found is that this small room of stillness is there, almost clearer and almost more precious somehow, in those times when the usual patterns of volition, of self-determination, seem to be lost, and whatever baneful thing is in the air has, finally, hit the fan.

If you have ever been in a life-or-death emergency situation, you will know that it wasn’t a problem. The mind didn’t have time to fool around and make it into a problem. In a true emergency, the mind stops; you become totally present in the Now, and something infinitely more powerful takes over. This is why there are many reports of ordinary people suddenly becoming capable of incredibly courageous deeds. In any emergency, either you survive or you don’t. Either way, it is not a problem.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now p.65

Suzuki’s paradoxical remark about the universe begins to make sense. It is within now, as Tolle himself says, that what is is all there is. For once, we have dropped into the stillness that has lain beneath all that has come to be, and is beneath all that is becoming now. All the myriad contrivances of thought have dropped away; what is left is no thing – it is the ground itself, bright and unending.

Under the hood

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The Socratic Question, ‘What sort of person should I be?’ – and its variants, ‘What kind of life should I lead?’ ‘What values shall I live by?’ ‘What shall I aim for?’ – asks any reflective person, at any point in life, to pause and consider what really matters, and as far as practically possible to live according to the answers. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus pointed out that a person might be struck by the force of this Socratic challenge even in the last hours of advanced old age, and at that moment ‘begin’, as he put it, ‘to be wise’. It is never too late.

It might strain optimism to think that a philosophy of life could be arrived at early, in the sense that a youth might consider Socrates’ question, come to a decision, and thereafter live in conformity with that decision. Yet although it is never too late to consider one’s philosophy of life, neither is it ever too soon.

AC Grayling, Philosophy and Life: Exploring the Great Questions of How to Live

As I’ve mentioned here before, I came to my interest in philosophy very young – probably between the ages of 14 and 15 – during an extended spell in hospital. I don’t suppose it would have occurred to me then to frame my growing interest in terms of the Socratic Question as explained by Grayling in the quote above; but I was acutely conscious of a need to find out for myself what went on under life’s engine cover. There must, I was certain, be something that made it all go, some intrinsic power or energy behind everything; something that made sense of my earlier – for want of a better term – mystical experiences as a child recovering from a long illness. Academic philosophy, I soon discovered, was not the way to find out.

This longing to look “under the hood” – AKA metaphysical inquiry – has stayed with me all my life. It was the reason for my early interest in Buddhism and Taoism; for my tentative experiments with psychedelics. It was the reason I turned for some years to writing poetry. It was most certainly what drew me – apart from the felt need for a context, and a justification, for practice – to religion; and, paradoxically perhaps, it is what – out of a need to remain close to my own inner experience – has led me out of formal religion altogether.

My life has perhaps been a sequence of beginning again. Some might see this – as I have myself, often enough – as indecisiveness, or even faithlessness. But actually it has been, I now see, anything but either of those things; it has been a process of trying to be true to what I have actually encountered in practice – in stillness, in looking under the outward appearance of things, under the surface of my own apprehensions.

Now that I am getting close to the age of Epictetus’ imaginary example, I am just beginning to realise that just beginning is the necessary condition of insight. I first read Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind many years ago; it seems to have taken me more than fifty years to start to get a handle on what the title means. Now, perhaps, I have learnt to sit still.

Fade into emptiness

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[F]or a period of time each day, try to sit in shikantaza, without moving, without expecting anything, as if you were in your last moment. Moment after moment you feel your last instant. In each inhalation and each exhalation there are countless instants of time. Your intention is to live in each instant.

First practice smoothly exhaling, then inhaling. Calmness of mind is beyond the end of your exhalation. If you exhale smoothly, without even trying to exhale, you are entering into the complete perfect calmness of your mind. You do not exist anymore. When you exhale this way, then naturally your inhalation will start from there. All that fresh blood bringing everything from outside will pervade your body. You are completely refreshed. Then you start to exhale, to extend that fresh feeling into emptiness. So, moment after moment, without trying to do anything, you continue shikantaza…

Even though your practice is not good enough, you can do it. Your breathing will gradually vanish. You will gradually vanish, fading into emptiness. Inhaling without effort you naturally come back to yourself with some color or form. Exhaling, you gradually fade into emptiness—empty, white paper. That is shikantaza. The important point is your exhalation. Instead of trying to feel yourself as you inhale, fade into emptiness as you exhale.

Shunryu Suzuki, not always so

To the conscious self, emptiness will always feel like death. But in emptiness that which is unnamed, aside from words, is free for once. Elizabeth Reninger:

It may take weeks, months, or even years to unwind certain psychic or physical contractions and break free of old habits and beliefs. But unlearning and release can also happen in a single moment of aesthetic rapture, or with a deep belly-laugh from understanding a joke, or from the dizzying mental meltdown of fully grokking a paradox.

In such moments, we’re left in a “space” characterized by an unspeakably sweet kind of knowing, a spaciously vivid awareness that is sometimes likened to the experience of a mute person tasting candy. The only thing that we might be able to say is “Ahhh . . .”

Out of such moments—these gaps between thoughts—arise a natural innocence, curiosity, and spontaneity, along with the deepest kind of contentment. If only for a moment, we are at home.

Home is in fact the emptiness we so struggle against. The way things come to be, the patterns on the surface of the stream – they are only moments in emptiness, points of light on the water. There is no thing to find: the sweet essence itself is emptiness, inexhaustible, yet quite outside “is” and “is not”: the safest place there is.

Into the light

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Dr. Welton assigned me to the newest body, where dissection had just begun, and specifically to the left hand. He wanted tendons and ligaments exposed. Day after day, I took my tools and sat alone beside the table and carefully opened the hand, following diagrams in a thick book. I did a good job. I gradually came to understand that hand, and all hands, in a way that remains with me now. But I came to understand something else as well. One day, I had almost finished exposing the tendons. I found that by pulling on them gently, I could move the fingers one by one. I had never been uneasy in that room, but that day I looked up the length of the body, naked except for the covered face, and all at once I was covered in goose bumps.

Dissection is more a psychological experience than an intellectual one for many people. I found it to be both. I remember more about how it felt to be with the dead, to touch and open a body, to see what happens to bodies, than any details about the insertion of the latissimus dorsi muscle. (I learned that, too, in a way I could never have learned from books.) Working with cadavers makes it clear what death is. A subject becomes an object. A person becomes a body. And, miraculously, turns back: this body, this firm, immobile object, is, was, a person, a warm, breathing person. A body is not an ordinary object—can never be an ordinary object. This particular object had once been awake.

With a jolt, I realized that what I was cutting apart had been a living hand, just like mine; that it had been pliant and animated. It had held a pen, shoveled dirt, bathed a child, stroked someone’s hair. That it was like my precious hands, which until that moment had simply been part of me. Alive. I realized, This man is like me. I already knew that this body was like my body; I could label its parts. But suddenly I knew that this man was like me. And that I would be like this man.

Sallie Tisdale, Advice for the Dying (and Those Who Love Them): A Practical Perspective on Death

Sallie Tisdale’s recollection of her Anatomy and Physiology course is one of those passages that is especially precious to me. I cannot quite remember – it was long before my formal split from Christian faith and practice – precisely when it was I realised for myself, with perfect immediacy, that I was my body; my body was me, and one would not survive the other. It was sometime during the period when I was very ill with coronary heart disease, certainly, and, with the utter sense of reality that seems to characterise such times, I saw that death was no more than a dissolution into light – the safest, most natural consummation imaginable. (This was no intellectual exercise, but a vivid, real experience more certain than life itself.)

Throughout Buddhist literature in particular there are many intimations of this “clear light”, most notably I think in Dzogchen, where it is an attribute of the Ground (gdod ma’i gzhi). (I have long felt that Tillich’s phrase “the ground of being” was perhaps closer to expressing the irreducible Istigkeit than anything else I’ve read.) The ground of being is there, and only there, when we come to an end of ourselves. It lies far beyond all we know as self, or other – though it can appear to us so utterly other that we are tempted to hide from it – and yet the way to it is inward, into the extreme depths of what we are. The ground of being is no thing: it precedes thingness.

The ground is the end, that to which all things return. Kathleen Dowling Singh:

[Death] is the experience of ‘no exit,’ a recognition of the fact that the situation is inescapable, that one is utterly at the mercy of the power of the Ground of Being… Love is the natural condition of our being, revealed when all else is relinquished, when one has already moved into transpersonal levels of identification and awareness. Love is simply an open state with no boundaries and, as such, is a most inclusive level of consciousness. Love is a quality of the Ground of Being itself. In this regard and at this juncture in the dying process, love can be seen as the final element of life-in-form and the gateway to the formless.

Of course one cannot practice for death, at least not intentionally. But one can practice with death in mind. To sit in the bright stillness of shikantaza is no more than that.

That everything is included within your mind is the essence of mind… Even though waves arise, the essence of your mind is pure; it is just like clear water with a few waves. Actually water always has waves. Waves are the practice of the water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion. Water and waves are one. Big mind and small mind are one. When you understand your mind in this way, you have some security in your feeling. As your mind does not expect anything from outside, it is always filled. A mind with waves in it is not a disturbed mind, but actually an amplified one. Whatever you experience is an expression of big mind…

Before we were born we had no feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called “mind-only,” or “essence of mind,” or “big mind.” After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have feeling. You have difficulty because you have feeling. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact we have no fear of death anymore, and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

When the water returns to its original oneness with the river, it no longer has any individual feeling to it; it resumes its own nature, and finds composure. How very glad the water must be to come back to the original river! If this is so, what feeling will we have when we die? I think we are like the water in the dipper.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

An Open Ground

Secular contemplative spirituality and practice