Today I'll write about the book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki. This blog post is next to this article, "About "Worst One", "Giving" and "Attitude toward Life and Importance of Continuing" of the book "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki". I believe this book gives deep insight into our lives and help us live better. Let's get started.
Limiting
At first, I quote the lines I love.
"You may think that if there is no purpose or no goal in our practice, we will not know what to do. But there is a way. The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity. When your mind is wandering about elsewhere you have no chance to express yourself. But if you limit your activity to what you can do just now, in this moment, then you can express fully your true nature, which is the universal Buddha nature. This is our way."
I agree with this idea. In this modern world, it's not easy to focus on our important things because there are a lot of things we can do. But as the author says, if we don't limit our activity, we can't express anything after all. In the process of making music, I always limit my activity. There are a lot of things to decide by myself. What lyric, arrangement, harmony, melody, guitar sounds, piano sounds, what synthesizers should I use, how should I sing, what kick, snare, hat sound should I use, and so on. So limiting is essential. By limiting, I can find the sound I was looking for. Thus limiting tells us the crucial things for us. So if you have feel that you can't express yourself now, how about limiting your activity?
Calmness
Next, I want to write about calmness. In this book, the author talked about calmness like this.
"A Zen poem says, "After the wind stops I see a flower falling. Because of the singing bird I find the mountain calmness." Before something happens in the realm of calmness, we do not feel the calmness; only when something happens within it do we find the calmness. There is a Japanese saying, "For the moon; there is the cloud. For the flower there is the wind." When we see a part of the moon covered by a cloud, or a tree, or a weed, we feel how round the moon is. But when we see the clear moon without anything covering it, we do not feel that roundness the same way we do when we see it through something else."
These passages contain such an interesting idea. Indeed if you are in the noisy crowd, you can't listen to music. And the author goes on.
"When you are doing zazen, you are within the complete calmness of your mind; you do not feel anything. You just sit. But the calmness of your sitting will encourage you in your everyday life. So actually you will find the value of Zen in your everyday life, rather than while you sit. But this does not mean you should neglect zazen. Even though you do not feel anything when you sit, if you do not have this zazen experience, you cannot find anything; you just find weeds, or trees, or clouds in your daily life; you do not see the moon. That is why you are always complaining about something. But for Zen students a weed, which for most people is worthless, is a treasure. With this attitude, whatever you do, life becomes an art."
Calmness makes weeds something more than weeds. It makes trees something more than trees. And poems will be born there. This is art.
Emptiness
I think this emptiness is the most important point of Zazen.
"When you understand one thing through and through, you understand everything. When you try to understand everything, you will not understand anything. The best way is to understand yourself, and then you will understand everything. So when you try hard to make your own way, you will help others, and you will be helped by others. Before you make your own way you cannot help anyone, and no one can help you. To be independent in this true sense, we have to forget everything which we have in our mind and discover something quite new and different moment after moment. This is how we live in this world."
If we don't have emptiness, we can't learn anything and feel freshness. If we don't have emptiness, we can't accept new things, different things. So I think it's important to forget everything. And he goes on.
"So we say true understanding will come out of emptiness. When you study Buddhism, you should have a general house cleaning of your mind. You must take everything out of your room and clean it thoroughly. If it is necessary, you may bring everything back in again. You may want many things, so one by one you can bring them back. But if they are not necessary, there is no need to keep them."
Yes. If we forget or abandon something essential for us, we can bring them back. So we don't have to worry about forgetting. I think the most important thing is to have a mind that identifies what is essential for ourselves from others. In the process of limiting our activity, abandoning, forgetting a lot of things, our mind will be sharpened more and more. And at last we'll find essential elements to us.
Today I put the pen here. Soon I'll write about other parts of this book I haven't written yet. Thanks for your reading. And I hope you'll enjoy this post. Feel free to leave me a comment.
