Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

This book is a collection of a series of discourses given by Shunryu Suzuki, who started the first Soto Zen Monastery in the West, the Zen Center at Tassajara, and the Zen Center in San Francisco. For the purpose of this book, the talks were compiled and edited by Trudy Dixon.

Suzuki-roshi beautifully captures the essence of Zen in the very title. To have a Zen Mind is to have a Beginner’s Mind –

“…an empty mind and a ready mind. If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything; it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.”

The book has been divided into three Sections – Right Practice, Right Attitude and Right Understanding, “roughly corresponding to body, feeling, and mind.” To sum up, if these three are correct, we are in a state of Zen, regardless of whether or not we assume the actual physical pose.

In some ways, I found reading this book akin to a meditative session – letting go of preconceptions, dropping the argumentative intellect, and accepting that which seems oblique at first glance. There is a gentleness to the philosophy expounded in this book, a complete lack of effort to persuade, convince, or convert.

Suzuki-roshi does try to make a nice distinction between Zen Buddhism as opposed to earlier Hindu systems of thought. However, within its vast embrace, Hinduism comfortably includes many diverse and apparently contradictory modes of belief. A student of Hinduism may find that Zen is merely Advaitic Vedanta spoken with a Japanese accent.