Crooked Cucumber

Lecture by Josho Pat Phelan

The book, Crooked Cucumber by David Chadwick, is a biography of Shunryu Suzuki or Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki Roshi was the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and Tassajara which was the first Buddhist monastery in North or South America; and we treat him as an honorary founder of this Zen center along with Katagiri Roshi who visited the group here and led sesshin several times in the 1980’s. Crooked Cucumber isn’t just about Suzuki Roshi’s life, but it also convey’s his way of practice and teaching. Suzuki Roshi was born in 1904, and his father was a priest and his mother was the daughter of a priest, and Suzuki Roshi wasn’t born until his father was 50. He was his father’s first child, although his mother had been married before and had a son from that marriage, but her first husband divorced her for being too independent. Suzuki Roshi’s second wife, Mitsu Suzuki came to the United States a couple of years after he did, and she might be accused of having the same flaw–being too independent or out-spoken, at least for a woman. After Suzuki Roshi died on December 4,1971, Mrs. Suzuki remained at the San Francisco Zen Center until 1992, where she taught Tea Ceremony to students at the Zen Center. But she was also a teacher to some of us, of how to be a priest or how to care for a temple. She now lives with her daughter in Japan, not far from Suzuki Roshi’s Japanese temple, Rinso-in, and she just turned 101.
When he was a boy, Suzuki Roshi decided that he wanted to become a priest. Just before turning twelve, he left home and began his formal training, with Gyakujun So-on, a priest who had trained with Suzuki Roshi’s father. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is dedicated to Gyakujun So-on. Suzuki Roshi was the youngest of about five or six teenage boys that were training with So-on. In the beginning, Suzuki Roshi said that he had a hard time getting up for zazen, which was pretty early in the morning, I would guess around 3:30, much earlier than we have zazen here, but he said that he discovered he could do it if he jumped out of bed before he had a thought. Eventually he found that he could get up on time without using a clock. He said that this made him trust his body and mind to take care of himself. Just getting up when the alarm rings, or the wake-up bell is rung, is a way to practice – to act before thinking engages and we begin to make excuses and justifications for not getting up.

Initially, Suzuki Roshi practiced with Gyakujun So-on from about age twelve to fifteen. At some point during this time, So-on Roshi arranged for all the boys to practice with a Rinzai teacher for awhile. So-on’s words of advice were, "Don’t forgot beginner’s mind; don’t stick to any particular style of practice." He said, "When you go to a Soto temple, practice the Soto way; when you go to a Rinzai temple, practice the Rinzai way. Always be a new student."

Suzuki Roshi went to a Soto Zen Buddhist college, which is now Komazawa University. One of his professors told them, "Formal education is to explain what is and what it means. Actual education is to let it be, whatever it is, without explanation." "He [Suzuki Roshi] couldn’t accept that at first, but he came to see the connection – that one had to begin practice without knowing the way-seeking mind and for ‘a long, long time go round and round... until you get tired of trying to understand.’" Another time he said that "the way is to have ‘a complete experience with full feeling in every moment,’ not to use each moment to think about the past or future, trying to make sense of it all." [But] "To let it be...without explanation."

After graduating from college, when Suzuki Roshi was about twenty-six, he trained at Eihei-ji which was a monastery founded by Eihei Dogen Zenji in the 13th century, and it is one of two head training monasteries for Soto Zen. Eihei-ji is in the mountains near the China Sea and it gets many feet of snow in the winter. At Eihei-ji, Suzuki Roshi was an attendant to Kishizawa Ian, who was one of the leading teachers of Dogen’s work the Shobogenzo, and he was also one of the best-known Buddhist lecturers in Japan at that time. Suzuki Roshi practiced at Eihei-ji for only a year and then he practiced at the other head training monastery, Soji-ji, for six months. He and Kishizawa Roshi left Eihei-ji, around the same time and they both moved to the same area in Shizuoka Prefecture–their temples about three miles apart. Suzuki Roshi continued studying with Kishizawa Roshi for twenty-two years, attending Kishizawa’s weekly talks on the Shobogenzo, until Kishizawa stopped teaching at about age 82.

Eihei-ji is located on about 79 acres and now has many buildings, and monks come to train there from all over Japan. Suzuki Roshi said that at Eiheiji, "Cleaning is first, ...then zazen. We must take care of our surroundings before we use them: polish the wood, polish your mind, wipe down the floors, cover the cosmos." According to Crooked Cucumber, first thing in the morning before zazen, the monks at Eihei-ji washed at a long sink, with each person filling his individual basin 70% full. And when the monks were finished washing their faces, they poured the water out of the basin toward themselves. This is based on the practice that Dogen Zenji had established centuries earlier near a bridge just outside the current monastery gate which is called "Half-Dipper Bridge." When Dogen was alive, he drew the water he needed in a pail and when he was finished, whatever was left over, he returned to the same place in the creek, pouring the water toward himself out of gratitude and respect, rather than just pitching it somewhere. Suzuki Roshi said , "You may think it doesn’t make any sense to return the water to the river. This kind of practice is beyond our thinking." "When we feel the beauty of the river, we intuitively do it this way. That is our nature." I believe that when we clean our bowls at the end of the oryoki meal and the servers collect the left-over water, that we pour the water into the container toward ourselves, based on this tradition.

In one of Suzuki Roshi’s early talks after coming to America, he referred to an exchange that Dogen had with an elderly monk in China, was told in Dogen’s fascicle "Tenzokyokun." The monk was drying mushrooms along the monastery wall one hot summer afternoon when Dogen encountered him. Dogen asked, "Why are you out here in the heat? Why not go in and rest until the sun is lower in the sky?" The monk replied, "This is what I’m doing now. It’s my job and no one else’s job. Why would I try to be somewhere else?" After telling this story, Suzuki Roshi said, "The time is now. What we are doing is now. There is no other time. This is reality. I am here now. You are here now. That incident with the old monk taught Dogen what a Buddhist life is, what reality is. It is not for another time or another place or another person."

Another story Suzuki Roshi told in Crooked Cucumber about his childhood is that one of his teachers in elementary school told him that the way to be a great person is not to avoid difficulties but to use them to develop one’s greatness. And later Suzuki Roshi developed this line of thought saying, "A person who falls on the earth, stumbling on a stone, will stand up by means of the same earth they fell on. You complain because you think earth is the problem, having caused your fall. Without the earth, you wouldn’t fall, but you wouldn’t stand up either. Falling and standing up are both great aids given to you by the earth. Because of mother earth you can continue your practice. You are practicing in the zendo of the great earth, which is the problem. Problems are actually your zendo." In Zen practice, we face the wall when we sit zazen, but facing the wall also means facing our difficulties open-heartedly and not squirming, surrendering to our difficulties rather than resisting them.

Another teaching that is emphasized in Soto Zen is non-gaining mind. When we practice in order to achieve something, our practice becomes a means to an end, and it is operating in the conventional realm of cause and effect, driven by desire or grasping. In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Suzuki Roshi taught that we should practice because it is the best way to express what he sometimes called, universal nature–the inherent emptiness or truth of everything. He described zazen as "just sitting and being aware of universal activity." And hesaid, "Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for our practice because it creates waves in our mind. It is impossible, however, to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort. We must make some effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make. In this realm there is no subjectivity or objectivity.... it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort up to the last moment, when all effort disappears." Ordinarily effort is dualistic– involving the duality between us and the result we are trying to accomplish. But when duality disappears, we and our effort are one, and there is no separation between our effort and our activity.

Zen practice is pretty simple. We sit down, try to find an upright and balanced position, and then try to be present with the universe. This is our practice year in and year out. We don’t practice visualizations or guided meditation, there is no interesting or creative content and no stages, and we don’t graduate to a more complex form of meditation. We just keep feeling our breathing–allowing our breath to bring us to our present experience, getting to know the body and mind arising in this moment. For service, we keep bowing and chanting the same sutras, day in and day out. When we evaluate practice by our usual standards, there isn’t much to it–it becomes boring pretty quickly. But if we are awake, it is a way to return to the freshness and openness of consciousness before our expectations kick in.

When Suzuki Roshi began sitting zazen with Westerners, before long they began bringing him questions, supposedly asking "more questions everyday than he’d been asked in thirty years as a priest in Japan." According to Crooked Cucumber, his American students passionately wanted to understand Buddhism, Zen, themselves, life, death, enlightenment, truth... But Suzuki Roshi wasn’t quick to define things and he said, "If I give you an answer, you’ll think you understand." He wanted people to learn things for themselves in their own time. I think this is typical of Soto Zen. We are given instruction in how to do the forms but not why. The "why" is left up to us. We are encouraged not to move and we are told how to hold our hands in zazen, but not why. We really only know–deeply know–through our own experience. The longer we practice the fuller our understanding becomes, but this doesn’t necessarily mean we can articulate it to others

Suzuki Roshi came to America without any ideas of what he would do. He put up a sign on the building saying when Zen meditation took place, and he began sitting zazen and giving short talks, sometimes only 15 minutes long. Soon after this, he introduced service by chanting the Heart Sutra in Japanese. For at least several years, but probably more, service consisted of chanting the Heart Sutra three times in Japanese and his instruction was to "Chant the sutra with your ears." But doing floor bows was a problem for some practitioners who "complained that prostrations were too Japanese and, like begging, not appropriate for American Zen." But Suzuki Roshi told them that he had been taught by his teachers that bowing was a central practice of Zen. It was Buddhist, not Japanese, and that "Bowing is second only to zazen." He said, "It is bowing to Buddha. If you cannot bow to Buddha, you cannot be Buddha. It is arrogance." Then he changed the form of service from beginning with three floor bows, as it is done in Japan, to beginning with nine floor bows. And we continue that practice here for our longer services. One thing I like about doing floor bows is that I can’t think and do floor bows at the same time. Bowing engages my body, breath, and attention, with nothing left over to think with or to think about. When sitting at home, I recommend beginning with three or nine floor bows to help clear the mind and get the body engaged. Suzuki Roshi also said, "Bowing is a very important practice for diminishing our arrogance and egotism. It is not to demonstrate complete surrender to Buddha, but to help get rid of our own selfishness."

Many of us begin practicing zazen with the attitude of trying out practice as a kind of experiment to see what it’s like or how it might change us, which I think is natural. But another level of engagement may occur some time later, where you might begin taking responsibility for the practice here at the zendo by cleaning the meditation hall or bathrooms, by making tea, ringing bells, trimming the altar candles, sifting the incense ashes, sweeping the front deck, and so on–doing whatever is needed to support practice for everyone. At some point, to get past certain barriers or reservations in practice, you need to commit yourself to practice for the rest of your life, regardless of what it does for you. The commitment itself becomes a great support that allows you to continue your practice without the need to objectify by looking outside your practice in order to measure your progress. When you are committed, practice is no longer something you "do," it is your life.

I will leave you with Suzuki Roshi’s words, "The time is now. What we are doing is now. There is no other time. This is reality. I am here now. You are here now. That incident with the old monk [drying the mushrooms] taught Dogen what a Buddhist life is, what reality is. It is not for another time or another place or another person."

Thank you very much.

© Copyright Josho Pat Phelan, 2015

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