shunryu suzuki never wrote a book. what exists is a record of a man talking, week after week, to a room of young americans in a converted synagogue on bush street in san francisco, and later in a stone-and-wood hall at a hot springs in the mountains — and of one of those students spending the last working stretch of her life turning tapes into chapters.
he arrived on 23 may 1959, aged 55, sent to serve the japanese-american congregation at sokoji temple. it was meant to be an ordinary overseas posting for a soto zen priest late in a normal career: ordained at 13, trained at eihei-ji, one of the two head monasteries, abbot of a small temple by 25. nothing in that predicted what came next. non-japanese san franciscans started turning up at six in the morning to sit zazen with him. the group outgrew the temple, became the san francisco zen center in 1962, and in 1966 bought tassajara, a hard-to-reach hot springs south of big sur, and made it the first zen monastery outside asia. (one note, because it happens constantly: he is not d.t. suzuki, the scholar. different man.)
the people who sat with him were, by his own frequent description, distracted people. minds full of ambition and politics and noise, arriving at dawn half-asleep or half-wired. if you've ever tried to sit still with a loud head, that room is you.
what he told them
he did not give them a technique for stopping thought. he told them what a busy mind is for. the opening line of the book that would carry his name: "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." the racing, associative, all-over-the-place quality of an untrained mind isn't a defect to be drilled out. it's raw material — the expert has narrowed down to a few moves; the beginner still has all of them.
and the line for the thoughts themselves: "you should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice." the intrusive thought, the irrelevant memory, the worry that shows up the second you sit down — don't yank at them. pulled, they come back. left, they compost. the practice, he kept saying, was the sitting itself, done daily and plainly, not the achievement of a quiet head on demand.
the noise isn't in the way of the practice. the noise is what the practice is made of.
the waterfall
his best picture of it is a waterfall he saw in yosemite. high on the mountain the water is one unbroken stream. then it hits the rocks and the wind at the top of the falls and shatters into countless drops, each one falling on its own path, each seemingly cut off from the rest. that, he said, is what our thoughts and fears feel like once we have a self — separate droplets, each urgent, each alone. but "whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water." the scattering doesn't break the whole. the point isn't to stop the drops from falling. it's to remember the waterfall they're still part of.
the second story
the book has a quieter story inside it. trudy dixon, the student who chose its three-part shape, wrote the section introductions and picked the epigraphs, did that work, by one account, while dying of breast cancer — continuing her own sitting practice lying down when she could no longer sit up. she died on 9 july 1970, before the book she'd finished reached print. suzuki was diagnosed with cancer the following year and died on 4 december 1971, at 67, as zen mind, beginner's mind was starting to move through the world he'd built. neither of them waited for a still mind or a good day to do the work.
the honest ledger
the book is compiled, edited talks, not something he drafted — worth one honest clause. and the most-shared 'suzuki' line — the one about leaving your doors open and not serving your thoughts tea — can't be found in any of his books or in the zen center's own archive of his talks. lovely idea. probably not his. it's not in this article.
for the noise, the practice is his, and it's short: sit down with the weeds. don't pull them. see what they turn into.