Re: 'Enjoy your problems' - Shunryu Suzuki

Good advice! Especially for BLs I think! Shunryu’s book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is a magnificent introduction to the depth and variety of Buddhist thought. It is quite a small book – Zen aspires to maximally efficient discourses, and it produces them. Shunryu of course speaks as a firm exponent of Zen. But apart from its rigor, this book was first published in 1970 and is a classic document of Western Buddhism arising out of Shunryu’s pioneering work in San Francisco, where he first arrived in 1959. Merton published Zen and the Birds of Appetite, including his important exchanges with Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki, in 1968, and he died in Bangkok, where he was attending an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks, that same year. Western Buddhism remains strongly Zen-influenced today, to its benefit I would argue. But I found it interesting that the monk with whom I studied, while ordained in a Vietnamese Mahayana tradition, taught a distinctly Theravada perspective on Buddhism. Sectarian divisions, while certainly significant in Asia, have exhibited an encouraging flexibility in Western Buddhism. In any case I really can’t think of Zen Beginner, Zen Mind as a sectarian work. I chose this quote from ZMBM not to argue with the quote you supplied, I don’t think they argue with one another, but to suggest the delicate balance that Shunryu achieves between acceptance and agency, a key philosophical balance for any religious attempt to provide ethical guidance: Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself. We say, "It is easy to have calmness in inactivity, it is hard to have calmness in activity, but calmness in activity is true calmness.” hugzu ;-p