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Shunryu Suzuki’s Big Mind

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In my years of Buddhist study, I’ve frequently come across the concept of duality and non-duality. I understood this idea only on a philosophical level until recently. I’ve been reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It’s amazing I hadn’t read this yet as its considered such a classic, but I had excluded Zen from my focus (not prejudiciously, but pragmatically, to focus my limited time for study on Theraveda) until it peaked my interest recently.

Early on in the book, Shunryu Suzuki talks about “big mind”. I knew this term from a Big Mind process video I saw years ago with Dennis Genpo Merzel. That was a little too psychoanalytic and discursive for my taste, but the idea of identifying with the universe (instead of just ourselves, our particularly group, country, or even the planet) seemed compelling. Shunryu Suzuki takes a simpler view of the term. Duality is small mind. Non-duality is big mind.

The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize “big mind,” or the mind that is everything.

Somehow, it clicked when I read this. I got it in an experiential and intuitive level. In any point of suffering, it’s possible to realize that suffering is small mind, limited to a self-absorbed view that isn’t seeing the bigger picture. By expanding the context of the mind the suffering is seen as it is: ephemeral, without substance, without weight. And this wider context of mind diminishes the importance of our small mind suffering. When this happens, there’s an internal protest – the small mind feels compromised. While at first this felt wrong, I quickly saw that it was like a child not getting the attention it wants and protesting.

The big mind concept reminds me of an old friend (who is not Buddhist at all) who, in a difficult situation, would always say, “In the grand scheme of things…” followed by some minimizing of the issue. After all, how much personal suffering is really of any substance or importance when considered in the grand scheme of things?

The non-duality concept comes in when you consider that there is no small mind and big mind. Everything is contained within the big mind. Everything – all of our experience and everything we know or can imagine. And in this way, someone else’s suffering (or joy!) is also part of big mind. The big mind concept helps me to recognize compassion, forgiveness, joy and equanimity within my own consciousness and also includes any possible concept of these attributes in others. It’s all in there. And with this, I started to understand what Zen teachings mean when they say that we already have Buddha mind.



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