MEDITATIONS WITH SUZUKI ROSHI by Gill Schwartz

During the mid-sixties, while I was visiting with friends in Berkeley, I heard that Suzuki Roshi was soon to offer a Sashin, a ten-day meditation retreat, in San Francisco. I'd been very drawn by what I heard of him and I called. I spoke with one of his senior monks about my experience in meditation. Although well experienced, I'd never sat for such extended periods. With his reassurance, two days later I moved into a simple room in a row of houses that were the quarters for retreatants. There was a special camaraderie with the others, mostly in their twenties like me, keyed up in anticipation of exploring the wonders of Zen with a Master.

On the first day of the retreat we gathered in the nearby Zendo temple, where it was held. I was pleased to find it was a converted wonderful old synagogue. The floors were cleared of all furnishings, the walls stripped of all the trappings I could envision. But I felt a special warmth in recognizing where the Arc of the Covenant had been at the back of the low stage, the gas fixture for the Everlasting Light above it still in place.

We chose spots for our meditation cushions on the polished age-stained, hardwood floors, places most of us sat through the retreat. The Hall was nearly full, mostly young hippy people. Suzuki Roshi's introductory talk was a simple welcoming that I listened to with soothing pleasure and drank in the simple ceremony he gently performed. He was a wonder to behold. A wizened, little man in late age, bald and somewhat stooped. Without his robes he could have passed for a shop keeper. But his modest exterior only emphasized that he held a clear and gentle presence in a way I'd never seen.

He gave the impression of being inwardly completely still, transparent to whatever was happening. He spoke simply, without theory or frills, and set the level of consciousness like a crystal tuning bell sets a tone. He told us not to seek 'experiences' but to look more to the quality of our consciousness. He suggested that, for starts, watching the effortless, unmanipulated flow of breath from the very rims of our nostrils would help us. It was a step in the wonderful adventure of simply staying present.

He instructed us in the traditional way of sitting, hands cupped Buddha-like in our laps, our narrow, lowered gaze resting effortlessly on the swirls and streaks of the floor before us. So we sat, from 5:45 a.m., just as daylight was clearing behind the stained glass arches of the windows that portrayed biblical scenes. Every 40 minutes we stood for a meditative stroll around the Zendo, eyes downcast to keep our attention contained. At 12:30, we silently ate the simple, Japanese style lunch, then sat again. During the mid-afternoon gathering, Roshi gave another simple talk on Dharma, living the Buddhist teachings, and encouraged us in our meditation practice. Then again we sat till evening. Groups of us would meet afterwards to have dinner in one of the many interesting restaurants in the area, chatting about our day's efforts and experiences. Then early to bed in readiness for rising at five or so for the next full day of sitting.

During these days of mindfulness and soul-healing inner absorption, my awareness was often drawn into deep areas of my psyche. Visions were given that changed my perception of life and that I still reflect on.
In those first days of the Sashin, in one of his talks, Roshi counseled us not to worry or be self-critical if there were thoughts or sensations that continued to rise to disturb our tranquil focus, as it was good to have something to bite and chew on when you're sitting. I was a bit confused by this comment as I'd always assumed that the Zen ideal was a quiet mind. But I soon got the example I needed.

As I'd hoped wouldn't happen, before long my left knee, that had been broken in a car accident, began to ache. I remembered Roshi's advice and, rather than changing my position to relieve it, I bit down on the experience of the pain.

It gradually seemed to spread throughout my leg, a sharp, burning pain that soon became excruciating. I continued to bite and chew on it till it spread through the whole left side of my body, from the tips of my toes to my very scalp. I was ready to collapse or stand up screaming, but, whether from pride or shame, I stayed with it. In the flames of the pain, the left side of my body seemed to sear, then disintegrate. My right side, from the centerline of my spine, remained neutral and untouched.

To all my inner feeling and impressions, the rotting flesh began to drop off, leaving the left side of my skeleton exposed. I was too fearful to even open my eyes to see what the real situation was. Then, from this pit of torment and despair, I felt new flesh began to form, different flesh than what had been covering me before. This flesh was clear and lucid. Before long, my bones, from my spine to the tips of my left fingers and toes, were sheathed in this wondrous substance. When the process was complete, I felt my left side covered with what seemed a diamond body, the transmuted self. My right side was still sheathed with the ordinary, course human flesh. Indeed, something marvelous had come of biting and chewing on what was given me. Pain and putrefaction turned to blissful transformation.

Late one afternoon, a few days later, as the lowering sun beamed through the radiant stain-glass window's depiction of David slaying Goliath, I was at such peace and openness, each breath flowed with complete satiation. The field of my awareness was gradually taken over by another 'Knowing'. This cleared my mind of all content, dissolved, emptied, then opened it to an immense spaciousness. A view of the Cosmos filled it. Galaxies of solar systems drifted through my awareness like long whiffs of smoke. The Knowing encompassed eons of light years.

In this, I was shown parallel clustered beams of life-force emanating from one direction, then another, then another, piercing through this fathomless space from one corner of the Cosmos to another. Each beam pulsated with a thousand varying energies, boundless potentials of being and form. Where they crossed, they created a grid work across the Cosmos. Knowing recognized this was a high dimension of the W.E.B., the Wholelife Energy Bond, My Knowing was then focused on the places where these life-beams intersected so that I could observe their synergetic interactions. Through this, their energies grew denser, congealed, and formed into individual beings. Each held their own unique shape and posture. Each radiant as a manifestation of these celestial forces. Cosmicaly created human beings! Knowing revealed that these were wayshowers, Awoken ones, focal points and dispensers of divine wisdom and compassion on the earth planes.. These were ten thousand Boddhisatvas needed to catalyze humanities awakening. These were lightbearers that could help save us from our self-extinction. While past ages needed only a few such awakeners, this desperate and crucial age needs legions of them.

In his afternoon talks, Suzuki Roshi would sometimes share of his own life. He told how he'd originally been sent to San Francisco from Japan to minister to an older 'orthodox' Buddhist congregation. But in his role as a priest, using only his ritual functions and not his spiritual ones, he grew bored. A number of young seeking people found him over time as a Zen teacher and he ended up giving over his congregation to another Japanese priest and devoting himself wholeheartedly to these new disciples.

He commented, with gentle humor, that his wife didn't understand that choice at all. She thought he'd lost prestige with his own people in doing this. He confessed she couldn't really understand what he was doing 'sitting' with nothing to do all the time and preferred rather to watch television. He smiled and shrugged with a good-natured gesture of "who knows".

Later that afternoon, on a break, I passed by Roshi's closet-sized 'office' under a stairway and nearly burst out laughing. Across his narrow desk from him was a gaunt, harried looking woman dressed in obvious hand-me-down clothing and a hat covered with artificial fruit. "I know, if you really wanted to, you could come heal my poor cat," she insisted demandingly in several ways.

And Roshi kept smiling and nodding and thanking her for her compliments but his work would not let him leave, just now... And never, for a breath, did he leave the stillness and transparency that was his. I was moved and understood how he was with his wife. And everything else.

During that afternoon's sitting sessions, again I was slid into expansive witness consciousness. I was shown a huge, endless forest and at its center, a placid Pond. I could hear birds and creatures moving around in the lush, surrounding woods. My witness Knowing was taken over the Pond's wind ruffled surface where I noted bubbles breaking through it. And as a bubble burst the surface, a thought broke into consciousness. Another bubble burst, another sudden awareness of a thought, or a memory, or a feeling. I was intrigued, amused at how this happened. So primordial!

My Knowing's perspective was lowered so that I could see just above and just below the Pond's surface -an amphibian's perspective. I could now see that the bubbles were rising from the Pond's depths, but only when they broke the surface and dispersed did awareness of their contents come to consciousness.
Wonder and curiosity drew my Knowing down to the bubbles' source, down to the depths of the Pond's floor. A rich loam, the compost of eons of sediment fermented there. A steady, diffuse effervescence emanated from this that, as it rose, gathered into the bubbles that burst at the Pond's surface overhead, innocent of intent or manipulation.

Witness awareness affirmed, "This Pond is the deep Mind." This is the true nature of thought, I realized. It happens. It is not created, not willfully done.

My perspective expanded now to reach throughout the Pond to include this profoundest process as well as the outermost. The totality of the workings of Mind was there before me. I was enraptured with the scope of my awareness. seeing into both realms of my psyche, conscious and unconscious, outward and innermost, equally clear, together. Enraptured, I saw my wholeness as I never had before.

Then, oddly, I noted a voice, far-off, calling out, "My thought." " My memory." "My feeling" just after each bubble broke into the expanse of the outer mind. I was startled, offended by the presumption to claim as his own what was clearly beyond anyone's possessing. "My thought", indeed!

In an indignant huff, I burst out to seek the loudmouthed pretender. I found him there on the Pond's far shore, idly playing in the sand. It was me! Not the Knowing, inner me, but the outer, limited and conditioned-bound me, desperate and arrogant enough, I knew, to pull such a stunt.

So Me, the seer, in the play of higher consciousness, witnessed the little me, fool and charlatan, despoiling what I saw was True in his futile attempt to believe he had control over his thoughts and actions and therefore was safe. His naive helplessness touched me. He seemed as ephemeral as a ghost, a figment of the psyches creation. I recognized that he was the psyche's subjective function, not actually an objective part of it. But I recognized too that he was often the pitiful brunt of forces beyond his furthest imaginings. My anger dissolved. I felt the dearest compassion for him, perhaps mixed with pity.

I recognized him as an innocent, in childlike uncertainty, seeking some sense of identity. That desperation was the impulse behind making his claim, his calling out with each bubble's bursting at the Pond's surface. Knowing's awareness, broad and open enough to perceive all these facets, at first was amused, even touched with my ego's waif-like eagerness to claim some part in this incredible process of Mind. And I realized that perhaps only it, in all this huge and variegated self, is the seed form of the personal 'I-sayer', of my seeking and claiming a sense of selfhood. All my other aspects and sub-me's seem content to just be what they are.
With this vision as guide, over the years, I've watched how my ego, that tiny beam of light in a huge and endless Unknowable, seeks every guise and opportunity to claim a selfhood. To justify this, I've watched it pretend to carry life-directing responsibilities that were completely beyond its capabilities, though its pretends claimed otherwise. I watched it strive with these insurmountable futilities by pretending to restrict my life to be simply on the surface of my soul, where the Pond's bubbles burst.

I need to be reminded, reawoken again and again to the Knowing that meditation had shown me some forty years ago. The ego is an overwhelmed witness to the mystery of this Self's coming into being and passing away. Like a child, when it feels recognized and cared for, it can thrive in that role. But when it is ignored, burdened or wounded, it adapts a helpless child's venomous tactics. Beyond that, in all innocence and eagerness to partake, it simply contributes it's groundless, naive claim, "My thought..," "My feeling..," "My memory..."
Over the decades since then, that glimpse of those different natures of mine have been a guide and support with honoring my inner multitude.

I wrote this poem late one evening after one of Roshi's most moveing talks.

Roshi wasn't well and
it spoke through his thin slumped shoulders,
the frequent pauses he took to regather himself.

Then he paused some while longer.
You could feel the moan of concern
from the group. When he continued, though weakly,
it was clearly from a high level of Realization.

"When Butso lay in his sickbed, he was content
with his finiteness," Roshi told us with a story-line lilt,
"but he tried to console his visitor student.
He explained to him, 'the Sun-faced Buddha lives a thousand years,
the Moon-faced Buddha but a month.'
There is nothing to gain and nothing to lose, if one knows one's Buddhahood.
'Does Enlightenment cure one's illness, end one's suffering,' he tried to exemplify for his student.
'How have your been these last days, Master?' he responded, staring down at Busto's drawn face.
'The Sun-faced Buddha,' Butso nodded and replied. 'The Moon-faced Buddha.'"

This next meditation was at one of our last sittings. Though I was gratefull with all I'd been shown, as well as the simple bliss of just resting in the silence of my being for days, I had one more life-quest I prayerfully asked for guidance on. My soul yearned to understand the nature of woman better.

As if higher Knowing were waiting for the question, I was shown a lovely long curve of tropical beach. Golden sands welcomed long rolling waves, backed by a forest of coconut palms. The ocean breeze rustled their leaves into a song that matched with the waves' long, gentle splash.

This was background to a tall pillar of sandstone before me, carved by nature or tools I couldn't tell. In its hourglass shaped surface were two spirals from its flat top to its base resting on the beach, one twisting clockwise, the other counter clockwise. A double helix. Atop its flat surface was a large, splendid seashell, a conch-shell, shiny smooth flesh pink on the inside, a rough, gray lackluster outer surface.
A breeze miraculously flowed through it, bewitchingly giving rise to a tenor hum. It rose and fell with the breeze's whimsies, giving a heart intriguing, poignant depth to the coconut trees' leaves' rustling and the ocean waves' long sighs.

I shuddered with a soul quenching as I felt the primordial Feminine flowing into me through every sense, through every thirst in my male being. My question had been generously answered.
By the Sashin's end I'd received many life-changing gifts. The visionary insights into my cosmic and personal realities opened new paths that I still follow. And there was the crystal tuning bell of Roshi's presence and teachings as catalyzing models of how to hold all experience. I was left with an afterimage of him as a figure on one of those stained glass windows that glorified the Light pouring through it.

Copyright Nathaniel Schwartz 2003