A Tribute to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
When I began a serious study of Buddhism, the first book I read was the collection of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I read from its first paperback edition, 1973. I was immensely fortunate to have begun with this book. Not only did I begin the practice of zazen by virtue of this book, learning from its brief description of how to sit, but also I was influenced by it to follow a right spiritual path. Roshi says in the chapter, Control,[1] “To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment.” If “to die as a small being” is a person’s ideal as he or she starts on a spiritual path, he is certainly headed in the right direction.
The aim of Zen practice can be stated rather simply. It is to function in daily life without the sense of oneself in one’s mind. Thought, feeling, emotion, all can go on in a person without this sense of self. It seems to me that the absence of a sense of self is what Roshi means by “Big Mind,” which he often opposes to “small mind” in his talks. Big Mind is the mind without a sense of self, or awakened mind. Small mind is the ego, personal self, I-consciousness, however one wishes to put it.
The idea of living without self is enforced, either explicitly or implicitly, in every chapter of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. For example, in the chapter, Bowing, Roshi says, “In your big mind, everything has the same value. Everything is Buddha himself.” Viewed through small mind, that everything has the same value makes no sense. Aren’t there both good and bad, aren’t some things preferable and others not? That “everything is Buddha himself” can be realized only when the mind is without self and therefore free from the liking and disliking that ego is prone to.
The same conditions maintain respective to Roshi’s remarks in the chapter, No Trace. Roshi says, “You should burn yourself completely,” meaning, as I see it, that after you do or say something, you should not worry about its consequences or the impression it might have made. In other words, don’t leave any trace. Years ago, I was in a dharma-discussion group that was reading Roshi’s book, and a psychotherapist said about burning yourself completely, that it was impossible. Of course he was right if you are bringing small mind to your activities and conversations. If you are bringing Big Mind to them, however, the mind in which a sense of oneself is not present, then after doing or saying something, you simply forget about it. That is the normal behavior of a mind that is not carrying a sense of personal self.
Similarly, in the chapter, God Giving, Roshi says that we are used to thinking “I create” the advantages of civilization, such as airplanes and highways, whereas actually, in Christian terms, “everything was created by God.” The same idea can be found in Keizan’s Transmission of Light, where it is “the host within you” or “old Shakyamuni Buddha” that directs our behavior. [2] In the same way, Roshi says in the chapter, Buddha’s Enlightenment, “. . . Whatever we do is Buddha’s activity.” Small mind supposes that it is always the doer of its activities. In contrast, Big Mind, without a sense of personal self, feels that it is not the doer, or the mover, but that it is being moved.
The gradual effect of the practice of zazen is that ego or personal self drops into the background. As this happens, through zazen a person can share in the state of mind that Suzuki Roshi conveys, where everywhere one looks, there is Buddha, where one’s life is without worry about reception by others, where whatever one does seems to be beneficently guided, and so on. May all practitioners enter into this grace.
Footnotes
- I wrote this essay from notes I had taken on the edition of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind mentioned in the first paragraph. I no longer have this edition and therefore cannot verify page numbers for quotations. Identifying quotations by their chapter in the book seemed a good alternative.
- Zen Master Keizan, Transmission of Light, Boston, 2002, pp. 26 and 6.