Stands with the Best

Mind Sky: Zen Teaching on Living and Dying by Jakusho Kwong.  Wisdom Publications.  178 pp. $18.95.  *****

I have a bias that a dharma teacher’s first book is usually the best one.  With most teachers, they finally get it together to put out a book (or somebody does it for them), and it’s not anything they wrote, just a compilation of talks they gave, which were subsequently transcribed and then edited or rewritten, and they do a bang-up job on the first book, then that does well and they decide to do a second.  They’ve put their whole teaching into the first book, so the second just repeats things, and it isn’t a monumental effort because they’ve done this before and the thrill is gone.  They should probably throw it into the incinerator.[1]  Instead they give it to a publisher.

All of Suzuki Roshi’s books are valuable, but the best is Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.  He never did any of those books; it was his students who put them together, but the remarkable Trudy Dixon worked on Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind before her tragic death from cancer at the age of 30.  Joko Beck is a brilliant teacher in everything she says, and she never said it better than in Everyday Zen (though I’m delighted that her daughter published that posthumous third volume, especially because her introduction tells us things we didn’t know).  And Trungpa’s collected works now resemble the Encyclopedia Britannica , but I still think his most valuable books are the early ones.[2]

I also think that first generation of teachers is the best.  I’m a sucker for dharma books, always thinking I’ll find a new perspective[3], but I’ve never found anything more valuable than the books I read in the nineties when I first discovered Buddhism.  If anyone puts out a collection of Mel Weitsman talks, I’ll be all over that.  Otherwise I rely on Suzuki Roshi, Kosho Uchiyama, Katagiri, Joko Beck, and Trungpa.  That’s a pretty good lineup.

This book is the exception to all that I’ve just said.  Jakusho Kwong is the one current teacher who I think is as valuable as the earlier ones, perhaps just because he studied for a decade under Suzuki Roshi and is able to put the man’s understanding into his own words.  No Beginning, No End stands with the best of those dharma books.  And Mind Sky is like an addendum to that book.  The two books stand as one volume in my mind.  They’re great dharma teachings.

I think that’s because they’ve been culled from a much larger group.  No Beginning, No End—edited by Peter Levitt, who lends his poetic sensibility and his knowledge of the dharma to the project—is based on talks given over twenty-seven years, and it’s only 252 pages long.  Similarly, editor Sally Scoville went through thousands of pages to produce the 174 pages of Mind Sky.  In contrast to people who publish every word the teacher utters (the names Thich Nhat Hanh and Chogyam Trungpa come to mind), Kwong’s editors have distilled the best of his teaching.

I would say, for instance, that the first essay in this volume, “Emptying Into Spaciousness,” is a complete Zen teaching in itself.  You could read that and know everything you need to practice.  I realize that’s a bold statement, but let me just quote a few passages from these ten pages:

“In meditation, it’s common to try to stop the mind’s activity entirely.  That is actually the worst thing to do, because the result is invariably more activity.  There’s nothing wrong with coming to meditation in order to quiet the mind, but since trying to stop the mind during meditation is impossible, what you need to do is let it pervade your whole body.

“ . . .this attention to body-mind eventually leads to an expanded awareness both of your own body and of the entire universe in which it exists.  When mind truly permeates body, you are concentrating neither on inside nor outside, nor in between.  Rather, you concentration permeates your whole body.  This means that the mind itself is fundamentally uninterrupted and capable of reaching through the entire universe. . . .

“You don’t escape from your delusions in zazen.  Instead, you look straight at them, since you have to work with them.  This is the paradox.  You never enter a promised paradise in which there is no delusion.  But all your delusions are workable.  If they weren’t, I think we’d all go mad.”

I could go on.  I would happily type out the whole piece.  It alone is worth the price of the book.  Kwong also includes a commentary on the great poem “Song of the Grass Roof Hut,” another work that encompasses all of Zen teaching, and memoirs of encounters with Korean Master Seung Sahn, Chogyam Trungpa, and Mitsu Suzuki.  Kwong never comes across as a Zen master who knows everything, just a helpful guide on the endless process of encountering your mind and the universe.

The man encountered Suzuki Roshi in 1960, at the age of twenty-five, and—unlike so many people—immediately saw the value of the practice and began sitting at the Zen Center every day.  He’s still sitting 62 years later.  You find the distilled wisdom of those years in these two beautifully edited books.  They’re a treasury of the dharma.

[1] Thornton Wilder once said the writer’s best friend is the incinerator.

[2] The exception to this general rule, I would say, is Katagiri.  I found his first book really rough going, and prefer the more recent books edited by Andrea Martin.  I think his best book is the most recent one, The Light That Shines Through Infinity.

[3] I’m actually appalled at the number of dharma books I have.  Five complete shelves of my bookcases.  What the hell did I think I was going to find?