Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

How often do you find yourself waiting for the right moment—thinking clarity, peace, or meaning will arrive someday soon? Zen Is Right Now, edited by David Chadwick from recollections of students of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, gently dismantles that very illusion. It asks you to stop searching for wisdom in the abstract and instead dwell fully in the immediacy of now. Through a mosaic of short, vivid anecdotes, the book embodies Suzuki’s teaching that enlightenment is not a future achievement but the ever-present life already unfolding in this breath, this task, this interaction.

The book collects dozens of personal stories, responses, and spontaneous exchanges between Suzuki and his American students throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, primarily at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and San Francisco Zen Center. The charm of these teachings lies not in doctrinal precision but in their warmth, humor, and radical normalcy. Zen here isn’t portrayed as a remote ideal, but as the art of living with simplicity, awareness, and kindness—moment by moment.

From Japan to San Francisco: A Journey of Transformation

Suzuki Roshi arrived from Japan in 1959 to minister to a Japanese-American congregation but soon found himself teaching young seekers drawn to Zen’s promise of direct experience. He founded Tassajara, the first Buddhist monastery in the West, and pioneered a style of practice open to both men and women—married or single. Yet his most profound legacy wasn’t institutional. It was relational and immediate—his way of meeting each moment, and each student, with compassion unburdened by ego.

Chadwick’s collection honors that spirit by letting Suzuki’s voice shine through lightly, without commentary. As we move through his sharp one-liners (like “Just get up”) and paradoxical jokes (“Enlightenment? You won’t like it”), a pattern emerges: Zen isn’t a system of answers but an invitation to keep opening to life’s fluidity.

The Dharma of Everydayness

One of Suzuki’s recurring lessons is that practice and enlightenment are not two. Washing dishes, falling asleep, laughing with others—all are expressions of the Buddha-nature if done wholeheartedly. In one anecdote, a student fretted about life’s meaning, and Suzuki answered calmly, “Eternal meaning is in your everyday life.” In another, when a student complained about mental distraction during meditation, Suzuki said, “Whatever bird flies through the sky, the sky doesn’t care.” Such remarks point toward a radical acceptance—of thoughts, pains, and the endless imperfection of being human—as the true field of practice.

Suzuki refused to treat Zen like an academic subject. When a college asked about phenomenology and noumena, he laughed, saying, “That is not our way.” Instead, he embodied the teaching by how he drank tea, how he responded to frustration, and how deeply he bowed. His students remember the way he moved—naturally, unselfconsciously, “like the sutra come to life.”

Zen in Action: Humanity and Humor

The book also shows Suzuki’s humor and humility. He spills a lamp after lecturing about getting out of bed mindfully; he calls coffee “strong medicine” and then rolls on the floor; he jokes about his wife getting “seasick” before declining a boat ride. Yet in these moments there’s no façade. His laughter softens life’s seriousness, making wisdom accessible. When a student worried about being serious enough, Suzuki said, “Don’t try to be serious. Just keep up with our practice.” When another lamented feeling foolish, he smiled, “Ah, yes, I feel the same way.”

Underneath this light touch runs a quiet depth. Suzuki often turns paradox into practicality—telling one student to “feel your way along in the dark,” another to “follow the yes,” another simply “Don’t fight.” Over and over, he dismantles dualisms: enlightenment vs. delusion, teacher vs. student, you vs. me. “Sometimes I’m the teacher and you’re the student,” he said. “Sometimes you’re the teacher and I’m the student.”

Why It Matters Today

In a time of distraction and overanalysis, Suzuki’s teaching is almost prophetic. His directive—“Zen is right now”—shifts you out of anxious abstraction and back into embodied presence. It frees you from the endless quest for control or perfection by showing that awakening is not an achievement but an attitude. Today, when mindfulness is often packaged as a productivity tool, Suzuki’s words bring us back to the root. He didn’t promise calmness or success; he offered honesty, immediacy, and compassion as the true fruits of practice.

As you move through this summary, you’ll see how his everyday teachings form a mosaic of clarity: the paradox of ego and non-self, the humor in imperfection, the discipline of simplicity, the art of surrender, and the essential kindness that underlies all real practice. Together these threads weave a radical spiritual message: that enlightenment is not hidden, nor earned, but simply lived—in your breath right now.

At the heart of Zen Is Right Now is one line of pure immediacy: “Don’t ask me. Now is now. You have your now. I have my now.” Suzuki used these few words to dissolve questions about time, purpose, and even identity. When every moment contains its own perfection, there is nothing to seek beyond the unfolding present.

The Freedom of This Moment

Suzuki’s insistence that “now is beyond question and answer” challenges the mind’s habit of analyzing life as if understanding could substitute for being. The present, in his view, is not an object to grasp but a living mystery to inhabit. The student who asked “What now?” wanted instruction; Suzuki’s answer pointed instead to direct awareness. This echoes the Zen phrase shikantaza—“just sitting”—a practice of resting in complete presence without chasing thought or rejecting it.

When You Stop Asking, You Start Seeing

Throughout the book, Suzuki redirects questions away from theories and back toward lived experience. Asked about the meaning of life, he said, “Eternal meaning is in your everyday life.” When a student asked about enlightenment, he replied, “I think you won’t like it.” Both teachings highlight that when you step out of the mind’s search for conceptual clarity, a different kind of understanding becomes possible—the kind that unfolds in washing a dish, hearing a frog, or sipping coffee with your teacher.

Paradox as Practice

Suzuki’s paradoxes are not riddles but experiential doorways. When he said, “We must not forget that we are the center of the universe,” he wasn’t affirming ego but reminding students of their inseparability from all things. When he said, “There’s no place to go; there’s nothing to do,” he pointed not to apathy but to a freedom that appears when striving falls away.

This embracing of paradox resonates with other Zen masters like Huang Po or Dogen, who said that practice “is itself enlightenment.” Suzuki taught in that lineage but with a twentieth-century warmth—turning cosmic truths into friendly reminders that “Everyone is doing their best” or “Follow the yes.”

Living Your Own Now

Suzuki’s message always returned to individuality within wholeness. Each person has their “own now,” a unique lens on the same unfolding reality. His instruction is an invitation to trust your experience without comparison. You don’t need to borrow the teacher’s moment; you need to inhabit your own. That’s why he said, “It’s your zazen, not my zazen” and refused to tell students how to count their breath. True practice, for Suzuki, could only arise from personal engagement with this moment—your exact now, no more and no less.

In today’s culture of constant distraction and curated perfection, that lesson strikes with refreshing simplicity. It says that your deepest peace has never been elsewhere—it’s just been waiting for you to actually show up.

When a student asked Suzuki how much ego is necessary, he replied, “Just enough so that you don’t step in front of a bus.” This perfectly captures his humor and insight. Ego, in his understanding, isn’t a villain to be eradicated but a tool to navigate daily life. Problems arise when we mistake this limited instrument for our entire identity.

Seeing the Small Self Clearly

Suzuki repeatedly emphasized that the “small self” is an illusion, yet a functional one. He told students, “We say there is small self, but that is the mistake.” This echoes Buddhist teachings on anatman—no fixed self—and parallels modern psychology’s view of the ego as a constructed narrative. The ego helps you cross the street, hold a job, or communicate. But clinging to it creates suffering, as it separates you from others and from life itself.

Big Mind vs. Small Mind

Suzuki encouraged students to “cultivate the big mind,” a phrase meaning expanding awareness beyond personal preference or fear. When a student wondered why “big mind can hide so well,” he quipped, “Because it is so big…or because you are too nearsighted.” Big mind isn’t something to find—it’s the open awareness already present when we stop obsessing over our stories.

Humility as Enlightenment

Suzuki’s humility modeled this truth. He met foolishness with compassion. When someone told him they felt foolish, he smiled, “Yes, I feel the same way.” When asked how he differed from others, he answered, “It’s the difference between the little I suffering and the big I suffering.” The shift from little to big is subtle yet transformative—it’s the awakening from isolation into connection.

This approach resonates with other contemporary interpreters of Zen, such as Alan Watts (who contributes the epigraph “Thinking is a good tool—and a bad master”). Both men stress that ego and thought serve us only when used lightly. When held too tightly, they become prisons.

Right-Sized Selfhood

Suzuki didn’t ask for a selfless void but for proportion. Ego should be transparent, not dominant. As in music, a bass note grounds the melody but never takes over the song. By keeping selfhood “just enough,” you learn to live responsibly without being controlled by its dramas. You don’t step in front of buses, but you also don’t mistake the bus for destiny.

Perhaps Suzuki’s most radical lesson was that practice is itself enlightenment. This overturns common Western ideas of meditation as a means to an end. At Tassajara and Sokoji, students wanted progress charts and secret techniques. Suzuki kept saying, “Just get up.” When the same student returned later, proud of their maturity, asking again the most important thing to do, he repeated, “Just get up.”

Sitting with What Is

Zazen—seated meditation—lies at the center of his teaching, but not as an escape from life. He told one student who complained of pain and distraction, “That is our practice. Our way is to sit with painful legs and wandering mind.” In that straightforward sentence, Suzuki abolishes the idea of failure in meditation. The effort to return—to simply continue—is enlightenment in motion.

Activity Without Striving

For Suzuki, enlightenment wasn’t a mystical experience but a quality of simple completeness in ordinary activity. He once said emptiness is realized when we’re “involved in some activity completely.” At such moments, the boundary between self and world falls away. If you truly sweep, there is only sweeping. This teaching parallels Dogen’s statement, “To study the self is to forget the self.”

Yet his style of instruction was wonderfully earthy. When asked about hitting temple bells, he said each strike produces an “independent buddha”—one moment arising and the prior disappearing. Gong! Buddha. Gong! Another. Here enlightenment appears not as a peak but as continuous creation.

The Circular Path

Suzuki warned against goal-oriented spirituality. Having no goal feels aimless; having a goal gets you lost. Better, he said, to live by vow—a steady devotion to ongoing practice. As he told one student, practicing without end allows you to die well. Another day he put it poetically: “Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea—and sink.” The inevitability of the sinking makes the stepping all the more vivid. Enlightenment is not escaping that truth but embodying it fully.

While Suzuki Roshi is often remembered as a profound Zen master, Zen Is Right Now reminds you he was also joyfully human. He spilled lamps, told jokes, flipped in his robes, and once shared a half-eaten lotus root by placing it directly in a student’s mouth. These moments weren’t eccentricities; they were teaching gestures. Humor and tenderness were forms of awakening.

Laughter as Illumination

In one ceremony, Suzuki opened by saying, “I’ve come here to destroy your mind.” As people tensed, he clarified—with a smile—that he meant the “small illusory mind.” Later, when a student asked, “Why are you so serious?” Suzuki’s playful question broke the solemnity and led everyone to laugh. “If you start to laugh,” he said, “then it’s all right.” For him, laughter was not disrespect but release—the loosening of ego’s grip.

He often met students’ heaviness with kindness rather than instruction. When someone despaired, he said gently, “It will not always be this way.” When another asked how to help others, he replied, “The best way to help others is to have good practice. To help others is not different from helping yourself.” Compassion, to Suzuki, wasn’t sentimental; it was grounded in clarity.

Everyday Humor as Zen

Even awkward social moments became teachings. During a neighborhood encounter with a girl blasting music, a student grumbled it ruined their practice. Suzuki laughed, danced a moment, and went back inside. When asked later about naturalness, he said, “The only true naturalness is when you are you in its true sense in this moment.” Humor kept practice from ossifying into dogma.

Kindness as Boundless Practice

To cultivate kindness, Suzuki urged patience. “Don’t fight,” he told one student—meaning not just with others but with oneself. “That is the key.” To another asking about direction, he said, “Be kind to everything, one by one.” This turning of grand ideals into manageable acts reflects his pedagogy of intimacy. Unlike abstruse sutras, his Zen grew from acts of care—checking if his wife was seasick, bowing to each student saying “Thank you for your effort.”

Suzuki showed that laughter, empathy, and humility aren’t separate from meditation—they are meditation in its lived form. And in an age that often equates spirituality with solemnity, his bright irreverence feels like a breath of clean air.

Suzuki often told his students that Zen is “to feel your way along in the dark.” It’s a poetic antidote to the Western compulsion for control. He described practice as slow, uncertain movement guided only by careful awareness. If you rush or demand certainty, you “bump into things.” But if you proceed gently, “the results will be okay—you can trust what will happen.”

The Art of Unknowing

This guidance goes beyond meditation—it’s a way to live creatively with uncertainty. Suzuki taught that plans and logic have their place, but real freedom begins when we release the obsession to figure everything out. This is the heart of Zen’s trust in thusness—life as it is. When he said, “Mind does not come and go. Mind is always here,” he was reminding students that awareness itself never leaves, only our attention does.

From Control to Confidence

Paradoxically, surrender opens the deepest confidence. When asked about decision-making, Suzuki said, “Don’t hesitate. Don’t think which way is good or bad. When you do not think about it, you will intuitively know.” This aligns with the Zen idea that authentic wisdom operates beneath calculation. Inner clarity reveals itself when striving relaxes.

Surrender as Strength

Even near the end of his life, Suzuki modeled surrender. Talking about earlier power struggles, he said, “When I was young, I always won because I learned to conquer my impatience. But now I think it’s better to surrender.” This humility distills decades of practice into one insight: softness is stronger than resistance. As Dogen wrote, “The water that flows never grows old.” Suzuki’s way of unknowing—feeling forward with a soft hand—is an invitation to meet change with grace.

When you “feel your way in the dark,” you discover that the darkness itself isn’t an obstacle—it’s the path.

Suzuki’s dream, repeated to his Japanese student Seiyo Tsuji, was to establish an “American Zen.” That didn’t mean diluting the tradition but letting it take root in the soil of ordinary Western life. He taught housewives, artists, scientists, dropouts, and corporate workers alike, always adjusting the form but never the essence.

Zen Beyond Formality

Suzuki was deeply traditional—he maintained liturgy, robes, and bowing—but he translated their spirit into flexible practice. When a student asked how Zen masters behave alone, he said, “They laugh a lot.” When asked about bowing, he didn’t explain—it—he just bowed repeatedly, demonstrating that understanding comes through doing. He called Buddhism not “enlightenment or understanding” but “sharing the joy of practice.”

At Tassajara, this fusion of rigor and play created something new: a monastery where men and women, East and West, lived and practiced together. His legacy became the seed of modern American Buddhism—less about hierarchy, more about authenticity.

Everyday American Dharma

Suzuki grounded Zen in ordinary life: sweeping, cooking, working. When a student begged for the meaning of the Heart Sutra, he kept answering, “Help me sweep first.” With this, he turned chores into koans. Practice wasn’t separate from life—it was life itself. This resonates with later American teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, who turned washing dishes into meditation, or Jon Kabat-Zinn, who popularized mindfulness in daily tasks.

In this way, Zen Is Right Now captures a pivotal cultural moment—the merging of ancient insight with the daily grind of modern America. Suzuki’s approach showed that awakening doesn’t depend on temple walls but on an open heart wherever you stand.