“Zen for Beginners” – Judith Blackstone & Zoran Josipovic

Zen is not something we can learn, or even become, because we are already it, we can only be it.

Zen masters speak a lot about ‘beginner’s mind’. In Zen we are trying to become beginners, to experience life without the interference of our whole accumulation of opinions and ideas.

For example, if we look at a tree, and we have beginner’s mind, we won’t have to get into a dialogue with ourselves about how its an oak tree, there’s a lot of them around here, once I fell out of a tree just like this one, maybe if I sell the oak dresser in my room I can go to Bermuda, and so on – we just see the tree.

And then, because all of our sense are free to focus together, without distraction, we become aware of all kinds of things we otherwise wouldn’t notice – we can even sense that the life in the tree is not so different from our own, and at that point, we are reaching a level of perception which the Zen masters call ‘intimacy’, or ‘no separation’’. Zen teaches that when we are most aware, there is no separation of feeling between subject and object. Like the space inside and outside of a vase, we experience space inside and outside of ourselves to be continuous.

Beginner’s mind is unified mind. It is being completely involved in whatever we are doing.

The Four Noble Truths:

1. Life is suffering

2. Suffering is caused by selfish cravings

3. Selfish craving can be overcome

4. The Eightfold Path to overcome selfish craving:

- Right understanding

- Right purpose

- Right speech

- Right conduct

- Right livelihood

- Right effort

- Right alertness

- Right concentration

Zen is very practical. It’s not a philosophy – in fact, most of it’s teaching is aimed at getting us to shift our focus from abstract understanding to a more thorough experience with our whole mind. This includes every level of sensation, intuition, and reason at one time.

Zen teachers are always trying to free their students from the trap of intellectual analysis and to deepen their actual living experience.

Sartori is not forcibly holding the mind still or inducing a trance-like state. It is super alertness. It is something like the brightest idea you can have without the idea.

Sartori is not a product of the intellect. That wisdom has always been there.

Dogen’s Universal Recommendation for Zazen: …You should pursuing words and letters and learn to withdraw and reflect on yourself. When you do so, your body and mind will naturally fall away, and your Buddha nature will appear.

Haikun’s comment on the koan: What is the true mediation? It is to make everything; coughing; swallowing, waving the arms, motion, stillness, words, action, the evil and the good, prosperity and shame, gain and loss, right and wrong, into one single koan.

Because Zen Buddhists believe that everything is constantly changing, they practice opening themselves up to the natural flow of life, instead of trying to hold onto the past or manipulate the future.

An accomplished Zen student is always master of the situation, completely free to respond in any way. At the same time, he or she is totally involved in whatever is happening.

Modern Roshi Philip Kapleau writes that there are two stages of this involvement, mindfulness and mindlessness. These are simply two different degrees of absorption. Mindfulness is a state wherein one is totally aware in any situation and so always able to respond appropriately. Yet one is aware of being aware. Mindlessness, on the other hand, or ‘no-mindedness’, as it has been called, is a condition of such complete absorption that there is no vestige of self-awareness.

Zen teaches us that we are each the Buddha. Since that is our real nature, there is nothing we have to do to become the Buddha (although there’s often a lot of stuff for us to stop doing).

The 4^th Patriarch, Tao-hsin said: There is nothing lacking in you and you yourself are no different from the Buddha. There is no other way of achieving Buddhahood than letting your mind free to be itself.

…the Zen student is not trying to transcend, or to get away from nature. Our actual nature is the thing sought and realised by the enlightened person.