Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Review, Part 1: Right Practice

 I bought a copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki yesterday. Today I finished the first section of the book, "Right Practice." I want to share how much I enjoyed this book.

For context, I have had interest in Zen for about 10 years now. I was initially just interested in a meditation practice while in high school and college, but as I encountered more information on Zen Buddhism, I became more interested in learning more than just meditation (the irony is not lost on me, now). I kept a daily meditation practice off and on, for a year long streak at most,  and visited a Zendo when I lived in Chicago, Zen Chicago Meditation Community, which I highly recommend. I now live in New Jersey and have not found a nearby Zen community in the Soto style. Alas.

But I encountered this book at a bookstore yesterday. I had heard of it several times before, and said sure, I'll read it. I am glad I did. Even just a third of the way through the book, it has reminded me of many important aspects of practice that have renewed personal interest.

I want to give a short introduction to Zen and talk about what the book has taught me so far. I plan to follow this up with parts 2 and 3 as I read them.

Zen is a form of Buddhism that puts its main emphasis on the practice of meditation. It highlights direct observation and raw experience as the primary teachers. Though every form of Buddhism highly values meditation, Zen generally tends to say that you don't need to really know anything to practice Zen, you just need to meditate and keep a practice of doing so. Zen, as I have encountered it, doesn't posit the usual type of religious metaphysical beliefs, of particular things that exist and you need to believe in (e.g. a place called heaven or nirvana, or a magical force called karma). There's seemingly no woo-woo about what is out there in the world. It is as it seems.

Zen Mind is a collection of talks given by the author, later edited into the form of essays. This first part focuses on cultivating a practice of zazen (the name for meditation in Zen), i.e. how to do it everyday and what you should expect. Several big ideas in Zen are brought up in relation to this. I'm not going to run down the various sections, but instead highlight the parts that struck me.

I think the big take-home message from this section is, no matter where you are, if you sit zazen regularly, you will deepen your practice. You will see enlightenment more readily. And all you need to do is to sit zazen, say, every day. More is better. A particular passage struck me about this: 

Actually the best way to relieve your mental suffering is to sit in zazen, even in such a confused state of mind and bad posture. If you have no experience of sitting in this kind of difficult situation you are not a Zen student. [...] When you feel disagreeable it is better for you to sit. There is no better way for you to work on it.

This is an incredible idea to me. I spent a long time worrying about not "doing it right," that I shouldn't sit if I wasn't in the headspace for it. But this was the wrong idea. You should sit everyday, whether you feel like it or not. Moreover, my longest stretch of meditation practice came to an end because of personal difficulties that I felt obstructed my practice. But now I see that this is not the right approach. I should keep going.

Another big idea that came out of this section was that zazen is the practice, but it is a model for everything we do. The kind of awareness, mindset, and self-rigor we practice while sitting should be taken beyond zazen and into our lives more broadly. This doesn't come from directed effort to bring this mindset into the rest of our lives, but instead comes with the breakdown of the dualistic thinking of sitting versus anything else we do. 

Dualism is the enemy in Buddhism, dualism being the rejection of the unity of all things. It is our nature, but we must see the unity that is implicit in the universe. This applies even to sitting versus non-sitting: Zen is a way of life, not a separate activity we do every morning. Thus there should be no difference in how we sit and how we do anything else.

The last idea that struck me from this section was that it is OK to have bad practice, but simultaneously not put in effort for good practice. If we practice poorly, we have still practiced, but to put in effort again is dualistic: that there is a "before we practice well" and an after. The point of Zen is to see things as they are, not was we want them to be. So when we try to form our practice to a preconceived idea of how it should look, we lose track of what it really is. 

Part 2 should be up soon.