Today’s quote comes to us from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), one of the most important figures in the development of Buddhism in America in the last century.

A Sōtō Zen priest, Suzuki Roshi was born in Japan’s Kanawaga Prefecture to the abott of a small temple and the daughter of a Zen priest.  At thirteen, he ordained as a novice monk under the tutelage of one of his father’s disciples, Gyokujun So-on Suzuki.  So-on nicknamed him “Crooked Cucumber” for his capricious, inattentive nature.  After training, basic schooling, and additional study in the Rinzai tradition, Suzuki Roshi was given dharma transmission by So-on and later succeeded him as abbot of Zoun-in.  He also later trained at the famed Sōtō Zen temples Eihei-ji and Sōji-ji. 

In1959, he came to America to help at what was then the only Sōtō Zen temple in San Francisco.  Suzuki became popular among those involved in the counterculture in the Bay Area, and before long he founded the San Francisco Zen Center.  Later, he founded the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

Shortly before his death from cancer in 1971, he published Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind–one of the classic dharma books in the English language.  His other books Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness:  Zen Talks on the Sandokai and Not Always So:  Practicing the True Spirit of Zen were both published posthumously.

His only American Dharma heir was Zentatsu Richard Baker, who held the abbottship of the San Francisco Zen Center from 1971 until his resignation in 1984.  Among the achievements during his tenure as Suzuki Roshi’s immediate successor was the further expansion of the SFZC mandala with the founding of Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.

One of Suzuki Roshi’s other students, David Chadwick, published Crooked Cucumber:  The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki in 1999, and later established cuke.com, “an archival site on the life and world of Shunryu Suzuki and those who knew him.”

In his memoir Born in Tibet, another luminary in the development of Buddhism in America, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, credits Suzuki Roshi with inspiring him to found Vajradhatu–the organization that later morphed into Shambhala International.  In the book, Trungpa Rinpoche also wrote of Suzuki Roshi:  “He was a man of genuine Buddhism, delightful and profound, full of flashes of Zen wit.  In the example of his spiritual power and integrity, I found great encouragement that genuine Buddhism could be established in America.  His students were disciplined and dedicated to the practice of meditation, and on the whole presented themselves as precise and tidy…When Suzuki-roshi died in December of 1971, I was left with a feeling of great lonesomeness. Yet his death had the effect on me of arousing further strength; his genuine effort to plant the Dharma in America must not be allowed to die.”

Here’s the quote–perhaps Suzuki Roshi’s most famous teaching:

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.