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Anyone interested in reading this book should not be dissuaded by the negative rantings of the “humble monk” and “Dharma teacher”, whose reviews appear to be from the same person. This book does not disappoint. I first read it over 25 years ago and I’ve fondly returned to it time and again since.

This book is intended as a look at ‘Zen Mind’, mind at one with Tao. The term ‘Beginner’s Mind’ refers to the goal of always keeping our original beginner’s mind in our practice. To awaken to this mind, Suzuki encourages the practice of Zazen, for when we take the Zazen posture we are at once aligned with The Buddha and all of the Patriarchs, we perfectly express our own Buddha nature. The act of sitting itself is the actualization of Buddha Nature or Being. This IS the practice of Zen.

Zen is a practice, not a religion and as thus can not be blasphemed in the way that the negative reviewer asserts. Religion is an attitude of devotion to something other than yourself which is regarded as worthy of supreme devotion. Zen Buddhism is not the worship of Buddha. Buddha taught the way to eliminate the cause of human suffering and conflict, the way to awakening. Zen is the means to that end.

To the Dharma teacher and “Zen monk”, I quote Zen Master Dogen Zenji’s Bendowa. “You look on the meditation of the Buddhas and the supreme law as just sitting and doing nothing. You disparage Mahayana Buddhism. Your delusion is deep; you are like someone in the middle of the ocean crying out for water. Fortunately we are already sitting at ease in the self-joyous meditation of the Buddhas. Isn’t this a great boon? What a pity that your true-eye remains shut – that your mind remains drunk. The world of the Buddhas eludes ordinary thinking and consciousness. It cannot be known by disbelief and inferior knowledge. To enter one must have right belief. The disbeliever, even if taught, has trouble grasping it…. Your only purpose in reading the sutras should be to learn thoroughly that the Buddha taught the rules of gradual and sudden training and that by practicing his teachings you can obtain enlightenment. You should not read the sutras merely to pretend to wisdom through vain intellections…. While you look at words and phrases, the path of your training remains dark….Constant repetition of the Nembutsu is also worthless – like a frog in a spring field croaking night and day….Understand only this: if enlightened Zen masters and their earnest disciples correctly transmit the supreme law of the seven Buddhas, its essence emerges, and it can be experienced. Those who merely study the letters of the sutras cannot know this. So put a stop to this doubt and delusion. Follow the teachings of a real master and, by zazen; attain to the self-joyous samadhi of the Buddhas.”

The Buddha himself said “This is itself the Way to Awakening”.
Rating: 5 / 5

ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND : Informal talks on Zen Meditation and practice by Shunryu Suzuki. Edited by Trudy Dixon, with a Preface by Huston Smith and an Introduction by Richard Baker. 138 pp. New York and Tokyo : Weatherhill, 1970 and Reprinted.

Some years ago I undertook a fairly extensive program of reading in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism and in Zen. Most of my Zen books have since disappeared. Only the choicest remain, among which is Shunryu Suzuki’s ‘Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind.’

Buddhism may be said to have begun with the enlightement of the Buddha. Many centuries later, however, when Buddhism entered China, an incredibly elaborate and complex superstructure of Indian scholastic thought had grown up around the Buddha’s original insight. The Chinese, with their basically down-to-earth and common sense attitude, had little use for Indian over-elaboration and set about ridding Buddhism of it.

The Chinese, as Lin Yutang says, believe in a reasonable use of reason, and not in reason’s excesses. The end product of their effort to rid Buddhist thought of its heavy freight of scholasticism, and to shift the emphasis from theory back to the practical by centering Buddhism once again in the enlightenment experience, became what the Chinese know as Ch’an and the Japanese as Zen.

As Shunryu Suzuki himself pointed out, when freed of unnecessary theory and speculation, Buddhism as Zen becomes something that is basically “quite simple” (page 64). Its essence was brilliantly captured in the thirty-one verses of Third Patriarch Seng-ts’an’s ‘Hsin-hsin-ming,’ the very first Zen treatise in verse. This is a beautiful text that deserves to be far better known, and an easily accessible translation will be found in D. T. Suzuki’s ‘Manual of Zen Budhism’ (‘On Believing in Mind,’ pages 76-82).

The first verse of the original Chinese may be read as follows, with oblique marks to indicate line breaks:

“To realize the Way is not difficult / If you’d only stop choosing; / Just let go of all of your hate, and love, / And everything will be brilliantly clear” (my transl).

This statement may gain in meaning if we set it alongside an observation made by the great Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253), founder of the Japanese Soto sect of Zen Buddhism and one of the most brilliant philosophical minds Buddhism has ever produced, who wrote in ‘Genjo Koan,’ the third chapter of his ‘Shobogenzo’ :

“Conveying the self to the myriad things to authenticate them is delusion; the myriad things advancing to authenticate the self is enlightenment” (Tr., F. H. Cook, ‘Sounds of Valley Streams,’ page 66).

Suzuki Shunryu, who as a member of the Soto school was a direct spiritual descendant of Dogen, would certainly have understood this. In fact, so far as I can see, the idea expressed by both Seng-ts’an and Dogen Zenji is at the very center of his book.

‘Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind’ is a golden book that may be heartily recommended to all open-minded readers. In it they will find a Buddhism freed of all scholastic superfluities and unnecessary elaboration, and one that returns us to what the Buddha was really about.
Rating: 5 / 5