Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
18 May 2023 - 23 Dec 2024
- book by Shunryu Suzuki. although he says in the afterword "it's a good book, but I didn't write it"
- A remarkable book, as close as you can get to the experience of being whacked with a stick by a Master as you can get at home from a book (AFAIK, which is not far).
- Warns against "gaining ideas", see anti-purpose
- Bodhisattva way as a railroad track, you travel down it without problems, looking at the scenery. Don't look at the track, that indicates a problem. There is not even a track, other than sincerity itself. (see The Highway )
We say, "railway track," but actually there is no such thing. Sincerity itself is the railway track. The sights we see from the train will change, but we are always running on the same track. And there is no beginning or end to the track: beginningless and endless track. There is no starting point, no goal, nothing to attain. Just to run on the track is our way. This is the nature of our Zen practice.
- right effort – which is utterly different from "gaining ideas". Somehow.
You should get rid of excessive things. If your practice is good, without being aware if it you will become proud of your practice. That pride is extra. What you do is good, but something more is added to it.
- pride
- Breath as a swinging door.
- I am detecting a technique, a kind of simplifying view of mind and consicousness. The world is complex, you and mind and attitude should be simple, easy, straightforward.
- This is kind of anti-Minsky, but so what, it is in pursuit of different ends. And maybe not so anti – Minskyism involves regarding the complexity of your own mind, but what is doing the regarding? It too is complex (probably), but it can't see itself that way, there aren't resources. No matter what your path in the world, it is good to have a simple core you can relax in, otherwise mind collapses is a chaos of recursion.
Naturalness
To be natural is something we must work on.
- Not sloppy freedom but
naturalness is, I think, some feeling of being independent from everything, or some activity which is based on nothingness. Something which comes out of nothingness is naturalness, like a seed or plant coming out of the ground. The seed has no idea of being some particular plant, but it has its own form and is in pefect harmony with the ground, with its surroundings. As it grows, win the course of time it expresses its nature.
- Suggests Christopher Alexander and anarchism. Expressing a form but uncoerced by external factors (while being in harmony with them)
- It's a koan, duh. Working on being natural is a contradiction in terms, one of those self-destructing mechanisms that makes the rational mind like one of those old Star Trek computers being given an old paradox.
- Naturalness vs naturalism
- The latter is a philosophy, a metaphysics – declaring that there is only one kind of stuff. Naturalness means living as if this was the case – dropping the you vs. the world thing.
Activity
Everything is Buddha's activity. So whatever you do, or even if you keep from doing something, Buddha is in that activity. Because people have no such understanding of Buddha, they think what they do is the most important thing, without knowing who it is that is actually doing it. People think they are doing various things, but actually Buddha is doing everything. Each one of us has his own name, but those names are the many names of one Buddha. Each one of us has many activities, but those activities are all Buddha's activities. Without knowing this, people put emphasis on some activity. When they put emphasis on zazen, it is not true zazen.
- p126, Right Understanding