Word: shunryu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...proceed is liberating, and crucial. I like paradoxes, which is why, even though I'm not particularly religious, Zen Buddhism has always appealed to me. Take the paradoxical state that Buddhists seek to achieve, what they call sho-shin, or "beginner's mind." The 20th century Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who spent the last dozen years of his life in America, famously wrote that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." Which sounds to me very much like the core of Boorstin's amateur spirit. "The greatest obstacle...
...Downing begins in 1961, when Shunryu Suzuki, a quirky but brilliant monk in Japan's Soto Zen lineage, hung out a shingle in one of San Francisco's bohemian neighborhoods offering instruction in zazen. Unlike Rinzai Zen, which uses intellectual methods like koans to free the mind from itself, Soto Zen has few features that are susceptible to coffeehouse dilettantism. Zazen, the Soto school's central practice, is a unique method of wordless, thoughtless "just sitting," in which the mind seeks to become as empty as a puddle reflecting a cloudless sky. It is demanding, frustrating...
...that satisfying. Is he a complex and tormented visionary, a sage victimized by his own abilities or just another jerk in ceremonial robes? Ultimately, Downing leaves the decision to the reader. There are really no completely clean, morally unambiguous figures in Downing's story?and that includes even Shunryu Suzuki himself, who, wise and lovable as he might have been, certainly suffered from his own distinctive set of follies and foibles. Evangelizing America, it turns out, was only part of the master's plan. He also nurtured the somewhat grandiose dream of using his new American followers to help...
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