Zen mind, beginner's mind
A respected Zen master in Japan & founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, Shunryu Suzuki has blazed a path in American Buddhism like few others. He is the master who climbs down from the pages of the koanbooks & answers your questions face to face. If not face to face, you can at least find the answers as recorded in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a transcription of juicy excerpts from his lectures. From diverse topics such as transience of the world, sudden enlightenment, & the nuts & bolts of meditation, Suzuki always returns to the idea of beginner's mind, a recognition that our original nature is our true nature. With beginner's mind, we dedicate ourselves to sincere practice, without the thought of gaining anything special. Day to day life becomes our Zen training, & we discover that "to study Buddhism is to study ourselves." & to know our true selves is to be enlightened.--Brian Bruya
Stats for nerds
57recommend
96mentions
76people
2009–2026years
76% recommend23% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Aside from the sentence "How many experiences continue to consume us because they were never allowed to finish burning?", I'm not sure what to make of this article. But the book it mentions, "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind", seems worth taking a look at (an older one, not a promotion).
- Wow never thought I would see an article mention Shinryu Suzuki, very cool. I read Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind as a kid and I still remember practicing the sitting and breathing like it was a magical tome.
The hardest part I remember is the nothingness of meditation and I remember his warnings not to fixate on trains of thought. I should probably reread it sometime.
- One of my all-time favorite quotes is from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and it goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
There's such a wide divergence of experience with these tools. Often times people will say that anyone finding incredible value in them must not be very good. Or that they fall down when you get deep enough into a project.
I think the reality is that to really understand these tools, you need to open your mind to a different way of working than we've all become accustomed to. I say this as someone who's made a lot of software, for a long time now. (Quite successfully too!)
In someways, while the ladder may be getting pulled up on Junior developers, I think they're also poised to be able to really utilize these tools in a way that those of us with older, more rigid ways of thinking about software development might miss.
- Right now I'm reading As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (if you don't have previous experience with Buddhism I'd recommend starting with something broader like Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and find yourself a Buddhist meditation group!), and Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. Something else very much written for an intellectually-oriented audience but that gives inklings of a ladder into non-intellectual being, is Unwinding Anxiety by Judson A. Brewer. I liked it at the time, though I found I needed more help practicing the things that that book suggests, which led me deeper into Buddhism and eventually towards Dzogchen.
I wouldn't recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People, it is all about fine-tuning behavior to make a better impression on people, and that doesn't sound like the heart of the issue you described. The heart of that issue _could_ be that one clings to mind-concepts rather than trusting the whole being and feeling a connection with the universe. If so, one must slowly learn to trust the felt experience of life, to know that gut feelings and open-heartedness are just as important as thoughts (moreso in many respects), to trust that one can relax one's whole being and be carried by an infinite love within. It is a gradual progression.
- - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig)
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter)
- Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (Penrose)
- Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Suzuki)
- Demian (Hesse)
- The Stranger (Camus)
- Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut)
- Another Roadside Attraction (Robbins)
I have read many books that have had an impact on me for a time, but these are the books that have had an enduring impact going on now for decades.
And yes, one of these books, Another Roadside Attraction, is unlike the others. You can substitute any Tom Robbins book, or read them all!, but this is the book that started it all for me. Tom Robbins' books taught me to not take life so seriously.
Demian and The Stranger may be fiction, but let's just say their purpose is to get across a philosophical point.
Finally, with regards to Slaughterhouse-Five, you'll just have to read it.
Enjoy!
- Zen is also partly based on Taoism. I recommend Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.
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