Beginner’s Mind

In our practice, we discover things for ourselves. That was the way that the Buddha wanted us to go at it. “Don’t take my word for it. Check it out. Test it in your life.” Sometimes we find something and we glow all over. Like, “No one else has ever seen this.” In elementary school, we were told that Columbus discovered America. Did Columbus think he discovered America? Was he disappointed when he realized that there were people here before him?

Bernie taught us Not Knowing. It was the first of his Three Tenets. When he first told us about them, he described them as a restating of the Pure Precepts, a fundamental Buddhist teaching. Nevertheless, Bernie’s formulation seemed to point toward unexplored territory and became an important teaching for so many of us. Although Bernie didn’t claim to have discovered anything new, I saw him, continue to see him as a Zen pioneer, exploring if not discovering, new territories.

This morning, I’m realizing that Suzuki Roshi was mapping the same territory. Beginner’s mind is the mind of not knowing. I am not disappointed. I’m actually reassured, new words pointing to a place that my teachers have been pointing to for 2500 years. There is a timeless Zen instruction that may go back to the Buddha himself. “Don’t confuse the finger pointing with the moon.” The more different fingers pointing, the better my chances of catching a glimpse of the moon.

Sometimes, I feel I’m discovering something for myself. It’s a “Wow, this is incredible” experience. Has anyone else ever seen this? Have I discovered America? And then I find others who have known this all along. They may have said it in different words, different fingers, but they were pointing at the same moon. I’m not disappointed. I’m actually reassured. In the Wow moment, there was always a discomfort. Have I gone off the deep end? It’s so reassuring to realize that others on the path have been here before me. Other fingers pointing at the moon help.

I read Beginner’s Mind years before I met Bernie, back in the days when I wasn’t sitting, just collecting Zen books. I read it through but couldn’t make much of it, read it again after I’d been sitting a while, was wowed, but I didn’t get it all. “Beginner’s mind” was my reminder that I was just at the beginning. When I began teaching, I would tell students, “We are all beginners; some of us have just been beginners longer than others,” but I didn’t really get beginner’s mind.

Bernie’s Not Knowing helped. It took me deeper. His “It’s just my opinion, man” helped even more. It gave me a concrete tool for entering Not Knowing. And now strangely, I’ve added Sogyal Rinpoche’s attention instruction to the mix, and his pointing is taking me deeper. Am I catching a glimpse of what the old masters were talking about when they spoke of practicing zazen continuously?