One of my favorite books—favorite manuals, really—is Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki.
He says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s, there are few.”
Expertise is darn useful. It recognizes patterns, avoids old mistakes, knows which details matter. But it can also become a kind of compression. The more I know about something, the easier it is to see the category before I see the thing itself.
Suzuki isn’t asking us to become stupid. Beginner’s mind isn’t the absence of knowledge or experience. It’s a way of standing inside what you know without letting your shoes turn to cement. I find this much harder than it sounds.
The book is assembled from talks and still feels spoken. Ideas appear, disappear, return slightly changed. Sometimes an explanation leaves me less certain than I was when it began, which seems appropriate.
Suzuki talks about posture, breathing, repetition, effort, and the very ordinary difficulty of sitting still. The spiritual life he describes is physical. It’s in my hands, my spine, my breath, and my willingness to sit there without turning the whole thing into another achievement.
This is a problem for me because I like practices that produce results. I want to know if I’m progressing. I want a little dashboard somewhere telling me my Zen is up 14 percent from last quarter. Even when I’m actively trying to become less ambitious, I can become ambitious about becoming less ambitious.
Suzuki keeps returning to the activity itself. Sit because you’re sitting. Breathe because you’re breathing. Do the thing without constantly climbing outside it to ask what it means, whether it’s working, and what all of this says about you.
I can’t say I consistently live that way. But I’ve come to value the freedom in it, and meditation gives me a place to practice it. Sometimes I notice how quickly I’ve decided who another person is, what something means, who’s right, who’s ridiculous. Occasionally I can catch myself before the judgment hardens and look again.
That may be what beginner’s mind means to me now. Not becoming innocent again, and certainly not forgetting what I’ve learned. Just setting it down for a minute. Loosening my grip long enough for something I wasn’t expecting to get in.
The joke, of course, is that I can immediately turn this into another thing to master. A program for becoming exceptionally good at having no ambitions about becoming exceptionally good.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind doesn’t make Zen easy. It makes simplicity seem like enough to work on.