VISIONARY TEACHINGS
by Gill Schwartz

MEDITATIONS WITH SUZUKI ROSHI

         During the mid-sixties, while 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'd heard of him and I called. I spoke with one of his senior monks. Although well experienced in meditation, 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 the 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 old orthodox synagogue. The floor was cleared of all rugs and furnishings, the walls stripped of all the trappings I could envision had been there. 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 still in place above it .

         We chose spots for our meditation cushions on the polished age-stained, hardwood floor, places most of us kept through the retreat. The Hall was nearly full, mostly with us enthusiastic hippies. Suzuki Roshi's introductory talk was a humble welcoming that I listened to with soothing pleasure. He performed a simple ceremony with flowers and a simple copper vase. 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 was lucidly clear and present 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. He counseled us not to seek "experiences" but to look more to the quality of our consciousness. He suggested that, for starts, we watch the effortless, unmanipulated flow of our breath at the rims of our nostrils. It was a step in the adventure, he explained, of simply staying present. He instructed us in the traditional way of sitting with folded legs, hands cupped Buddha-like in our laps, our lowered slit of a gaze resting on the grain's swirls and streaks of the floor before us.

         So we sat, from 5:45 a.m., just as daylight appeared through the Old Testament scenes the stained glass windows portrayed. Every 40 minutes we stood for a meditative walk around the Zendo, eyes downcast to keep our attention contained. At 12:30, we silently ate the simple, Japanese style rice and vegetable lunch, then sat for meditation again. During the mid-afternoon gathering, Roshi gave another simple talk on Dharma, living the Buddhist teachings, and encouraged us in our meditation practices. Then again we sat till evening. Groups of us began to meet afterwards to have dinner in one of the many interesting ethnic 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 ten-hour days of mindfulness and soul-healing inner absorption, my awareness was often drawn into deep areas of my psyche and beyond. Visions were given that changed my perception of life and that I still reflect on today.

         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 an empty, quiet mind. But I soon got the example I needed to show me what he meant.

         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 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 firm and lucid. Before long, my bones, from my spine out 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.

         It was 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 flow was completely satiating to my being. The field of my awareness was gradually taken over by another 'Knowing'. It instantly dissolved, emptied, cleared my mind of all content, 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 higher dimension of the WEB the Wholelife Energy Bond,

         My awareness was focused to observe their synergetic interactions where these life-beams intersected. Here, their energies grew denser, congealed, and formed into individual beings, cosmic human beings. They were radiant as focalizers and manifestations of these celestial forces. Knowing revealed that these were Wayshowers, Awoken ones, focal points and dispensers of divine wisdom and compassion on the earth planes. These were the ten thousand Boddhisatvas needed to catalyze humanities awakening. These were light bearers that could help us save ourselves from 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 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 up from that, as it rose, gathered into the bubbles. Clearly, these burst the Pond's surface overhead, innocent of any 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   the 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 awareness. I was seeing into both realms of my psyche, conscious and unconscious, outward and innermost, equally clear. All the parts of my psyche, together. Enraptured, I saw my wholeness as I never had before.  

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

      I opened my awareness to seek this pretender. I found him there on the Pond's far shore, a young boy idly playing in the sand. It was a me! Not the Knowing, inner me, but the outer, limited, condition-bound me. Yes, I understood, he is desperate and ignorant enough, I knew, to pull such a prank.

         So Me, witnessed the little me, in his foolish and futile attempts to believe he had control over his thoughts and actions and was therefore   safe. I recognized that he was my psyche's subjective function, not actually an objective part of it. His naive helplessness touched me. He seemed as ephemeral as a ghost, a figment of my psyches creation. And I recognized too that he was often the brunt of forces beyond his furthest imaginings. I felt the dearest compassion for him, perhaps mixed with pity.

        I recognized him as an innocent, in his childlike uncertainty, seeking some sense of identity. That desperate need was the impulse behind his naive 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 as one, at first was amused, even touched with my ego's waif-like eagerness to claim some part in this fathomless process of Mind. And I realized that perhaps only it, in all this huge and variegated self, is the seed form of my personal "I-sayer" It is the impetus 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's meaning   to be simply on the surface of my soul, where the 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 desperate child's venomous tactics.

Beyond that, in all innocence and eagerness to partake, it simply contributes it's naive, fantasy claim, "My thought... My feeling.., My memory..."  

         Over the decades since then, that seeing into different natures of mine has been a guide and support in honoring my inner multitude.

         I wrote this late one evening after one of Roshi's most moving talks. Roshi wasn't well and it spoke through his thin, slumped shoulders and the pauses he took to regather himself. You could feel the moan of concern throughout the group. Then he paused some while longer, now in a meditative state. When he continued, though weakly, it was clearly from Realization.

         He gave us a teaching that this poem paraphrases.

"When Butso lay on his deathbed,
he was content with his finiteness,"
Roshi told us with a story-line lilt,
"But, to console a visiting student, who asked,
peering down at Busto's drawn face. 'How have your been these last days, Master?' ,
Butso responded '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?'
Butso sought to exemplify this Wisdom.
'The Sun-faced Buddha,' 
Suzuki Roshi sagely intoned for us,    
'The Moon-faced Buddha.'"

 

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

        As if higher Knowing were waiting for my request, I was shown a splendid, 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 the setting for a lofty pillar of sandstone, carved by nature or intention, I couldn't tell. In its hourglass shaped outer surface were two spirals running from its flat top to its base resting on the beach. One twisted clockwise, the other counter clockwise. A double helix. On the flat surface of its top was a large, splendid seashell. It was a conch-shell, shiny smooth flesh pink on the inside and a rough, lackluster gray outer surface.  

         A breeze miraculously wafted through this. It sang a bewitching tenor whir. This rose and fell with the breeze's whimsy, giving a heart intriguing, depth to the music of the palm trees' rustling and the ocean waves' long sighs. Here was nature's symphony. I celebrated a soul quenching as I felt this primordial Feminine flow into me through every sense, through every thirst in my male being. My questing 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 fork of Roshi's presence and teachings as catalyzing models on 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.

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Copyright Gill Schwartz 2003   www.WisdomVisions.com