When Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date.
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness is the first follow-up volume to Suzuki Roshi’s important work. Like
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made Suzuki Roshi so influential as a teacher.
The
Sandokai—a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian)—is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as Suzuki Roshi expresses it, ‘things-as-it-is’). Included with the lectures are his students’ questions and his direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. Suzuki Roshi’s teachings are valuable not only for those with a general interest in Buddhism but also for students of Zen practice wanting an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text today.
Cuprins
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Mel Weitsman
SEKITO KISEN AND THE SANDOKAI
Michael Wenger
NOTES TO THE READER
THE SANDOKAI
English Translation
Chinese Text and Japanese Transliteration
FIRST TALK
Things-As-It-Is
SECOND TALK
Warm Hand to Warm Hand
THIRD TALK
Buddha Is Always Here
FOURTH TALK
The Blue Jay Will Come Right into Your Heart
FIFTH TALK
Today We May Be Very Happy
SIXTH TALK
The Boat Is Always Moving
SEVENTH TALK
Without Any Idea of Attainment
EIGHTH TALK
Within Light There Is Utter Darkness
NINTH TALK
The Willow Tree Cannot Be Broken
TENTH TALK
Suffering Is a Valuable Thing
A SHORT TALK DURING ZAZEN
ELEVENTH TALK
We Should Not Stick to Words or Rules
TWELFTH TALK
Do Not Pass Your Days and Nights in Vain
TALK GIVEN TO A VISITING CLASS
We Are Just a Tiny Speck of Big Being
THE SANDOKAI
Compiled Translation by Suzuki Roshi
LINEAGE CHART OF TEACHERS
MENTIONED IN THE TEXT
Despre autor
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi came to the United States in 1959, leaving his temple in Yaizu, Japan, to serve as priest for the Japanese American congregation at Sokoji Temple in San Francisco. In 1967 he and his students created the first Zen Buddhist monastery in America at Tassajara in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco. Suzuki Roshi died in 1971 at age 67, a year and a half after delivering his teaching on the Sandokai. He may have had a premonition of his coming death when he said that it was common for Zen teachers in the Soto tradition to lecture on the Sandokai near the end of life.Mel Weitsman is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and current abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. Michael Wenger is Dean of Buddhist Studies at the San Francisco Zen Center.