![]() ![]() Bodhidharma’s Buddhism is to be practice, to be enlightenment.” For Shunryu Suzuki, kensho was not unimportant, but it was “not the part of Zen that needed to be stressed.” Suzuki (no relation) or in Three Pillars, not least in his approach to satori: “We practice zazen to express our true nature, not to attain enlightenment. Shunryu Suzuki taught a way of Zen practice very different from what is found in the works of D. In 1971, an edited collection of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks on Zen practice, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was published, and it soon became as influential among Zen students as Three Pillars. ![]() According to Three Pillars, kensho is not only possible it is, as it was for Suzuki, essential, and serious Zen practitioners are enjoined to apply themselves singlemindedly and with utmost determination to its attainment.Īt the same time that The Three Pillars of Zen was gaining popularity, a very different approach was being taught by Shunryu Suzuki, the founder and abbot of the rapidly growing San Francisco Zen Center community. ![]() (Throughout the book, Kapleau prefers to use the near-equivalent term kensho, “seeing one’s nature.”) With the publication of Three Pillars, the enlightenment experience described by Suzuki was brought home as something that was within the reach of regular people-such as the book’s readers-if they applied themselves to diligent practice under the guidance of a qualified teacher. The three pillars of the title are teaching, practice, and enlightenment, and the book includes first-person accounts of satori experiences in the context of Zen training. In the mid-1960s, Philip Kapleau’s book The Three Pillars of Zen addressed precisely that issue, and its publication helped catalyze the wave of new Zen practitioners that rose then and subsequently. While Suzuki focused on the experience of satori, however, he did not give much attention to the matter of how that esteemed experience was to be attained. Therefore every contrivance, disciplinary and doctrinal, is directed toward satori.” The sudden, direct, unmediated, spiritual apprehension of reality that is satori captured the imagination of Westerners hungering for a spiritual answer to the perplexities of life in secular industrial society. Suzuki, who is widely acknowledged for his role in introducing Zen Buddhism to the West, placed great emphasis in his essays and talks on the experience of satori, “awakening.” “Satori,” he wrote, “is the raison d’être of Zen, without which Zen is not Zen. ![]()
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