learn to love the question

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Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1904-1971), founder and long-time teacher at San Francisco Zen Center, told us that ”in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities but in the expert’s there are few.” With that line–by now a classic–the teacher throws us back to the question that underlies everything: Who am I? He points to the fact that we’re beginners always (how nice if I were to remember that more often). Each time I breathe, a new beginning. Each time I shave my head, for the first time. Each time I think of the one I love, a fresh kiss. Each loaf of bread I bake, the first. Each moment, unknown.

 

With this I sit quietly, scanning my body for physical sensations. Within seconds, monkey mind takes off, going here and there, jumping from thought to thought. Gently I refocus, notice breath rising and falling. Notice also cravings and aversions—what I wish for and what I dislike. Somewhere between polarities, so I imagine, resides Beginner’s Mind … flush with possibilities. 

 

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart,” offers Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) in his Notes to a young poet, “and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.” Not something I’m good at, I want to say … resorting to the familiar dualistic worldview: that good/bad view of things, that habit of seeing the world in opposites. Seek the middle way, the Buddha taught, see things as containing aspects of right and wrong, happy and sad, old and young. Each item, be it thought, feeling, fear, hope, etc, contains aspects of the extremes.

 

Rilke again: “Don’t search for answers, which could not be given now … the point is, to live everything. Live the question now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

 

sources: Rilke, R.M. (1984). Notes to a young poet. (trans. S. Mitchell). New York: Random House, p.34; Suzuki, S. (1970). Zen mind, beginner’s mind. New York: Weatherhill.