Informal Talks on Zen
Meditation and Practice

What is the source of our being?

If we engage in a general housecleaning of
our mind, what will we find?

   These are basic Zen questions, and in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind Shunryu Suzuki discusses the attitudes and understanding which make Zen practice possible.

   There are two main schools of Zen: the Soto and the Rinzai. The Soto school aims at heightened awareness of life through a simple practice of meditation. The Rinzai school seeks the same state through baffling the mind with paradox called koans.

   Shunryu Suzuki was a master of the Soto school. He stressed the importance of living with a beginner's mind—the mind we entered the world with. This mind, our peaceful mind, is sometimes called "original mind."

   Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is based on a series of informal talks Suzuki gave to a small group in Los Gatos, California. In this book, he describes Zen as something so basic to our nature, it is "religion before religion."

   Many people search for the answer to a question they cannot quite formulate. When some idea or practice fails to answer this unknown question, they go on searching.

   If this describes you, Suzuki's book may point you to both the question and the answer. Highly recommended.

From Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind:

-- "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

-- "Usually when someone believes in a particular religion, his attitude becomes more and more a sharp angle pointing away from himself. In our way the point of the angle is always towards ourselves."

-- "When you are you, you see things as they are, and you become one with your surroundings."

-- "If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain some wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you attain it, it is nothing special."

-- "You should rather be grateful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice."