Not Always So
Shunryu Suzuki—commonly known as Suzuki Roshi (“roshi” meaning “teacher” or “old master”) was a Soto Zen priest who founded the first Zen Buddhist monastery outside of Asia (that would be Tassajara Zen Mountain Center) and San Francisco Zen Center. He’s the author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He’s well-known for saying, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” He lived from 1904 to 1971. And he actually ordained my favorite still-living Zen priest, Edward Espe Brown, whom I’ve written about quite a bit on this blog already. Check out my post on the book No Recipe and the one titled How to Cook Your Life. Indeed, Edward (I am on a first-name basis with him) played a major role in bringing Suzuki’s Not Always So to fruition as a book. It’s actually a collection of his recorded dharma talks, which Edward and some others transcribed and edited and organized into book form. It was published in 2002 (very much posthumously). A hardback copy of it sits on Edward’s mantle, just above his right shoulder, when he gives his own dharma talks five days a week on Zoom. I try to attend at least two of those talks each week.
Edward references his beloved teacher, Suzuki Roshi, a lot in his talks. The man had a tremendous impact on his life, and in reading the collection of his words that Edward so lovingly helped create, it feels like sitting with Edward and feeling what he must have felt when hearing some of these words in real time, from the living, breathing man himself. It makes me wish I could have met Suzuki. But at least through Edward I have contact with him somehow. Whoever impacts us is bound to come through us now and then and impact others.
He organized Not Always So into five sections, each consisting of seven chapters or talks. The sections are titled, “Shikantaza: Living Fully in Each Moment,” “Letters from Emptiness,” “Practicing Zen,” “Not Always So,” and “Wherever You Are, Enlightenment Is There.” One could argue that those five titles represent the most important Zen teachings: those on being fully alive, now; those on emptiness, or what might be better explained as boundlessness or beginningless interconnectedness; those on the importance of practicing, of repeating; those on impermanence (nothing is always so); and those on the nature of enlightenment. I once heard Edward say that enlightenment is just the basic nature of reality, and we can “attain” it (although obviously there’s nothing to attain if it’s never actually out of reach) by being intimate with reality. Enlightenment is intimacy with what is.
But let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start! What stood out to me the most in the first section of Not Always So, which is about living fully in each moment, was the notion of being oneself. Suzuki emphasized this a lot in his teachings. Edward often quotes him as saying, “Some of you are trying to be good students. Why don’t you be yourselves? I’ll get to know you better that way.” In Not Always So he puts it like this: “When we are trying to be active and special and to accomplish something, we cannot express ourselves.” And why is that? Because we’re not meeting ourselves where we actually are. A really concrete example of this is when I try to talk while crying—I try to accomplish saying words instead of shedding tears. I realize that some people can talk while crying, and I’m always amazed by those people. But I am not one of them. When I’m crying, the best way for me to express myself is to keep crying. Once I’ve cried all I need to cry, then I can express myself with words. This is essentially what it means to be oneself. It happens on a moment-by-moment basis, this selfness. If I need to cry in a given moment, then I’m being myself by crying. If I’m angry, then I’m being myself by expressing anger. If I’m hungry, then I’m being myself by eating. I am myself when I am not resisting my experience of a given moment, and when I respond to the moment accordingly.
The other crucial piece to living fully in each moment is the understanding and appreciation of others. And of course the better we know ourselves (through the constant devotion to being ourselves), the more resourced we are to truly know others. Because we’ve been honest with ourselves about our own experience, we can invite others to be honest with us, and thereby really know them. If people don’t think they can be honest with us—either because we’re too fragile, or too quick to anger (which is also a kind of fragility)—then how can we actually know them? And of course the more honest we are, the more inclined others will be to express themselves honestly to us. I’ve experienced this phenomenon many times in interpersonal process groups. Even if what I’m expressing isn’t all positive, if it’s honest and vulnerable, people instantly trust me more than they did when I kept quiet. And I know that because they’ve said it. Suzuki says, “If you fail to express yourself fully [in] each moment, you may regret it later. Because you expect some future time, you miss your opportunity, and you are misunderstood by your friend. Do not wait to express yourself fully.”
In understanding others, we’re also allowing them to inform us. We’re including them in who we are. This means we’re willing to try out new perspectives. We need not cling to how we’ve always been. In always being ourselves in the present moment, we do not stick to an old self. Suzuki says, “You forget all about yourself and are refreshed.” By being flexible in this way and not sticking to anything, “there is no need to be afraid of anything, or to ignore anything.” Whatever arises in a given moment can have our attention as needed. This is how we “experience the everyday moments of our life more deeply.”
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But isn’t a huge part of Buddhism the notion that there is no self? Isn’t that—anatta—considered one of the three characteristics of existence, along with impermanence (anicca) and suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha)? So how can this Zen teacher be so insistent on people being themselves? Short answer: because he isn’t talking about the ego-self. He isn’t talking about the self that clings to ideas and beliefs. He’s talking about the self that is constantly realized anew by everything around it. The self that’s beyond all our conditioning. Indeed, this self can be hard to describe. Suzuki quotes Bodhidharma’s successor, Taiso Eka, in saying, “Because I know myself very well it is difficult to say who I am.”
Which provides the perfect segue into the next section of the book, “Letters from Emptiness.” My understanding of the Buddhist concept of emptiness has evolved over the years, and recently I’ve mostly been appreciating what a paradox it is. I recently heard Edward say, “We think of emptiness as ‘nothing is there,’ but it really means ‘everything is there, and we can’t grasp anything.’” Another related paradox that comes to mind is expressed in something Suzuki Roshi used to say that Edward quotes a lot, which was, “You’re perfect just as you are, and there’s room for improvement.” Isn’t this what one could always say about life in general? The room for improvement is the many problems we’re constantly trying to solve—the Buddha specified eighty-three of them, saying he couldn’t help with those. It was the eighty-fourth problem he could help with, which was the wish for no problems at all. We’ll always have eighty-three problems; solve one and another will instantly take its place. And that’s how things are supposed to be. In that way, life is perfect, just as it should be. It’s not a problem to have problems.
Suzuki puts it this way: “When you [try] to escape from your difficulty…you create another problem for yourself.” This doesn’t mean we make no effort to ever improve our situation, or simply respond to it. But it does mean that we don’t worry. We’re not clinging to some delusion of a problem-free life, and because we don’t have that delusion, there is no need to worry about losing it.
Emptiness, as I once heard Edward say, is ungraspability. Our true nature is ungraspable, because it itself grasps at nothing. In this way, it can appreciate everything. “When we become detached from things,” Suzuki says, “everything will be ours. Our practice is to realize this kind of big mind; in other words, to go beyond each being including ourselves, and let our self work as it works.” We don’t have to make our self do anything; indeed, we can’t make it do anything. We must simply let it.
But who is the “we” doing the “letting”? It’s all the same oneness, right? What Suzuki called “things as it is.” And that itself is a great definition of emptiness: things as it is. To be empty in this sense is to be all encompassing, interconnected ad infinitum, boundless. In such boundlessness, nothing can get caught on anything else. Nothing bothers us. It’s all just happening in what Suzuki calls “that great space.” The mind is one with everything, and everything exists within the mind. This too is emptiness. And with this understanding, our “fundamental attitude” becomes that of the student. “Whatever happens, [we] study closely and see what [we] find out.”
This is also the fundamental attitude I try to have when it comes to participating in and leading interpersonal process groups. As Edward recently said in one of his Zoom talks, “We’re studying how to be in relationship with the objects of our awareness.” We’re not trying to make anything happen; we’re just observing what is happening. What a relief! Even in a group, when nothing is happening, or when silence reigns, I can study my internal reaction to that. I don’t have to make people talk. I can ask, though, “What is this silence saying?” or “What isn’t being said right now?”
There’s a lot of openness to this kind of inquiry. It’s similar to feeling for your pillow in the dark, which is an analogy that Suzuki uses in the “Practicing Zen” section of Not Always So. He says, “When you seek something, your true nature is in full activity, as if you are feeling for your pillow in the dark. If you know where the pillow is, your mind is not in full function. Your mind is acting in a limited sense. When you are seeking for the pillow without knowing where it is, then your mind is open to everything. In this way you will have a more subtle attitude toward everything, and you will see things as it is.” And all we’re doing in group is seeking to understand what’s happening. What are people feeling and thinking, and how do I feel and think about that? The only action that needs to be taken is to verbalize those thoughts and feelings.
That sounds scary, you might say! It certainly can be. But if you approach it as a spiritual practice, you might, like me, take comfort and find courage in the notion that your spirit is always protecting you. As Suzuki says, “We are firmly protected from inside. That is our spirit. We are protected from inside, always, incessantly.” And the more aligned we are with our true nature—which I’d also call our spirit—the more easily we can access its protection. And staying aligned—or rather, finding alignment from one situation to the next—is practicing Zen. And since everyone is different, we must each find our own way. And this way is always changing, according to what circumstances present themselves. For this reason, Suzuki says, “You cannot stick to anything.”
This approach to experience is bound to come with our making some mistakes—or at least what might look like mistakes to an observer or teacher. But Suzuki says that mistakes are “expressions of the student’s true nature.” I love this idea. I find it especially helpful when contemplating the groups I run, and how at times I wish group members would act differently, make different choices in the group, in how they interact, even with specific words they use. Perhaps I’m judging those choices as mistakes, and thereby missing out on a more intimate knowledge of the group member’s true nature. If that is what they’re expressing, on some level, then how could it be wrong? I’m not leading groups so that I can make people be something that they’re not, after all! I’m wanting them to become more of themselves—and that doesn’t mean I’m always going to like them. Liking them all the time isn’t the point. The point is simply to study whatever I end up feeling when in these people’s presences, and to use those feelings as important information for responding as authentically as possible.
And of course “true nature” is not the same as habit or conditioning. It’s the opposite. Suzuki likens one’s true nature to their personality, and their ego to their conditioned ways of thinking and acting. He says, “If we cannot see any true personality in a person's work, it means that he has not yet eliminated his habitual way.”
In the title section of Not Always So, he addresses the times when people recognize their own mistakes as they’re happening. He refers to spiritual practice in particular. An example might be the realization one so often has while meditating that for the past five minutes straight they haven’t been meditating at all. They’ve been all caught up in a memory or fantasy, or they’ve been planning their meals for the week. An example from process groups—a different kind of spiritual practice!—might be when one realizes they’re not following the most important group agreement, which is to say how you feel as you’re feeling it, toward another person. The realization that you’re not speaking up is a kind of enlightenment, or what Suzuki calls “real practice.” He says, “If you know, ‘I am making a mistake, but even so I cannot help continuing with my practice,’ then there is no need to worry. If you open your true eyes, and accept the you that is involved in a wrong idea of practice, that is real practice.” With the acknowledgment of the mistake comes the space to get curious about it and eventually choose new behaviors.
The key is to not limit ourselves with binary judgments—good/bad, right/wrong, smart/stupid, kind/cruel. Instead, we can simply say to ourselves, “I’m not doing what I set out to do in this practice. What’s actually happening that’s making it hard for me to do what I actually want to do?” We can be and do any number of things that have nothing to do with good/bad, etc. It’s an infinite number, actually. Limitless. Suzuki says, “When you evaluate yourself by a limitless measure, each one of you will be settled on your real self.” (He uses that phrase several times in the book—“settled on your self”—and I love it.)
This notion of a “limitless measure” is similar if not synonymous to the idea that we each have an absolute value (as opposed to a relative value), and cannot be compared to anything or anyone else. In order to really connect with that value, we must be ourselves and stop comparing ourselves to others and trying to be like them, or to some ideal that we’re hoping to achieve. When our intention is to simply meet each moment with as much authenticity as possible, there’s nothing to achieve.
Suzuki writes, “Whatever people may say, you should go your own way, and at the same time you should practice with people… To meet yourself is to practice with people.” This is true on so many levels! It reminds me of what Dharma teacher Dave Smith said at a meditation retreat I was on a couple years ago: “We’re here to practice being alone with others.” It was a silent retreat, so despite being surrounded by people much of the time, I did feel quite alone. It’s a strange sensation. And boy did I “meet myself”! I met a very irritable part of myself, and one who assumed the worst in people, until the “cone of silence” was lifted and those people could actually talk to me and I could see that they were cool. Or at least cool enough.
Anyway, on the flyer I made for my first interpersonal process group, I used the phrase, “Where people can be, together.” Now I’m realizing how similar that is to Smith and Suzuki’s sentiments. In group—a par excellence example of practicing with other people—you meet yourself by noticing your projections and testing out their validity as they’re happening. And you also meet yourself by seeing your own behaviors in others. In many cases, the behaviors you most despise are the ones you also exhibit, or perhaps wish you could. And you meet yourself by being honest about what you think and how you feel. You meet yourself by sharing yourself.
This is something I find quite difficult. I’ve been in some kind of process group or other for about three years now and I’m only very recently realizing how hard it is for me to talk about myself in that setting. If I’m with my husband or best friend, it’s not hard at all. But when I’m in a group, I just assume that people won’t really care about any of my projects or ideas or relational issues or what have you. On Zoom it’s even trickier, because if I start to talk at around the same time as someone else, I will automatically (and usually gladly) defer to them. Whatever they have to say is probably more relevant, more meaningful, and more important. But in a process group session just last week, I realized that by depriving the group of me—of the emotionally significant story of my life—I’m also depriving myself of me and of the group.
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In the same title section of Not Always So, Suzuki once again addresses the futility of trying to improve one’s practice and achieve some ideal version of themselves. If you’re practicing to create a better you, then “your practice has gone astray. But if you just come here and sit with sincere students and find yourself among them, and you continue in that way, that is our practice. You can have this kind of experience wherever you are. As Tozan [a 9th century Chan monk] said, ‘Wherever I go, I meet myself.’” Suzuki puts it this way, which I think is wonderful: “Include [in yourself] everything that comes. Whether it is good or bad doesn't matter. If something bad comes: ‘Okay, you are part of me;’ and if something good comes: ‘Oh, okay.’” I find this idea of whatever I encounter—people, places, situations, feelings—being part of me incredibly compelling and liberating. Things aren’t just happening to me, they are in-forming me; I am becoming myself in new ways because of these things. Also just consider sensory stimuli. When you hear a bird chirp, that sound is actually happening inside your body, thanks to your ears and your brain. And the sound itself might have other chemical impacts on your body—dopamine for birdsong, cortisol for gunshots. In this way, those sounds—those birds and guns—become a part of me as I’m hearing them. “Whatever it is,” Suzuki says, “it is included within us, and we own it, so we call it big mind.”
I like to think I’d be a lot more thoughtful in how I related to my external environment if I considered everything I see, hear, smell, touch, and taste as part of me. Which parts of me should I pay most attention to? Which parts am I avoiding or averse to? To say it’s all a part of me is also to say that it’s basically the same as me. Tat tvam asi, as the Hindus say. That art thou or you are that. And to quote Suzuki again, “When you include everything, that is the real self.” Because actually you wouldn’t exist—getting metaphysical here—if the given object of your awareness or external stimulus didn’t exist. “We say that I am here and you are there. It is okay to say so, but actually without me you don't exist. Without you I don't exist… Since I am here, you are there. Since you are there, I am here.” We practice, he says, to be ourselves in this interconnected, interdependent way, not to solidify our egos around a notion of separateness. By settling on our real self, we settle on the moment and everything it includes.
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I once heard Edward say that the aim of practice is to be located—here. In other words, to not be dissociated from our own experience of the present-moment situation. His teacher, Suzuki Roshi, said that the ability to say “I am here, I am right here” is a kind of confidence in your very being. And when you possess this confidence, then you can practice true zazen “beyond perfect or imperfect, good or bad.” Then “whatever you do will be the great activity of practice.”
Henceforth I’m going to have this phrase in mind—the great activity of practice—when running process groups and when participating in them. Indeed, it might just become my mantra for all of life, because that’s all any of it is: practice. And the aim of that practice is always the same: to be located—here. To settle on our real self.
