Kaspa explores beginner's mind, the Buddhist practice of approaching life with openness rather than expertise. Drawing on Suzuki Roshi, the Kalama Sutta, and nenbutsu practice, he shows how letting go of what you think you know opens space for creativity and genuine attention.
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Namo Amitabha. So theme of the day has been beginner's mind, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. Beginner's mind was a phrase coined by Suzuki Roshi, who we've got a portrait of here that Satya painted. Um, and there's a book called Beginner's Mind, which is very influential to Buddhism in the West and to me personally. One of the first Buddhist books that really spoke to me, along with Katagiri Roshi's books. They're kind of similar in quality. Um, yeah, so he was a, a Japanese Zen Zen master who was sent to America to spread the Dharma teachings to San Francisco Zen Center, which is still a thriving Zen community today. Yeah, other side. And, um, he had a reputation for not talking about enlightenment very much. David Chadwick, who wrote his biography, said, I don't really know where that reputation came from, perhaps because Tsukiyoshi didn't use words like Kensho and Satori that other Zen teachers were using at the time. These big moments of kind of connecting with what we might say, uh, the Pure Land or Amitābha, suddenly having a deep sense of interconnectedness or non-duality moments. So he didn't use those Japanese words in the way that a lot of people were doing, but actually if you read the books, he mentions enlightenment quite a lot. And I think beginner's mind is one way of attempting to describe that. And the phrase comes from a lecture that he gave where he said What his actual words were: In beginner's mind, we have many possibilities, but in expert mind, there is not much possibility. And then when it was edited by a native English speaker into the book, became the quote which is much more famous: In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's, there are few. Which, you know, means the same thing, but But I don't want to claim to really know what Suzuki Roshi meant entirely when he said beginner's mind. I read that book, it was very important to me. I read other teachings and listened to lectures, but I wasn't his student. He never got the chance to say to me, ah, no, you don't know what you're talking about. So I'm just speaking from my own experience, drawing partly on the things that I learned from those experiences and from other places. But you know, we, we can all understand that very simple message. In the beginner's mind, there's lots of possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few, because the expert has already decided This is the right thing to do. This is the right tool for the job. This is how I was trained to do it. And that's a really useful kind of expertise. If you're going into surgery, you want someone who's very skilled and knows exactly where they should be opening you up and tying you back together again. But there is a stage beyond that expertise. Which includes creativity, where you include all of the skills and knowledge that you have, but you are not trapped by them. You're open to seeing new things in the way that when a child enters a room, and maybe Jo, you could, you could speak to this after the experience you had on Tuesday, they're kind of entranced by all the different, particularly the new things, you know, and they don't know what this means or what that statue means, but they're full of questions and full of liveliness and If you heard the kind of babble of school children's voices here last week, you'll get a sense of that. So there's something about that in the mix, not being constrained by what we think we already know. Years ago, when I was going to a different Buddhist group, someone came up to me afterwards. And I don't— I was quite a beginner in many ways, but somehow they sort of latched on to me and wanted to tell me about their dilemma, which was, I really hate my job. But the right thing to do is just to keep working through it, right? All the other people are really difficult, but I keep telling myself if I keep going there and enduring it, I can process all of this stuff and then I'll be okay. That's like, that's the Buddhist, that's the Buddhist approach, right? Um, I think it was a, some sort of tire place, like where you get your tires replaced, and, um hadn't occurred to her that she could leave and get another job. Like, that option was completely off the table. And I mentioned that, and it was like you could see this light bulb going off, like, oh, I'd never even thought that that was a possibility, that that was allowed, because she decided this is what a good Buddhist does and excluded something that was really valuable. So beginner's mind is a mind that includes all different things, all sorts of possibilities. It's free from shoulds and oughts. There's a sutra called the Faith in Mind Sutra that I quite like, um, Sutra means thread, like suture, speaking of surgeons again. And normally when we talk about Buddhist sutras, we're speaking about things that are attributed to the Buddha. I mean, a lot of the Mahayana ones were probably made up later and then put into the Buddha's mouth. But this wasn't, isn't anything to do— well, it's to do with the Buddha, it's written by a Buddhist, it's not purportedly anything the Buddha said. It's written by Master Xing Yan, who was a Chinese Buddhist master. The Great Way is not difficult. Simply avoid picking and choosing, neither love nor hate, and you will clearly understand. Be off by a hair's breadth and you are as far away from it as heaven is far from the earth. And there's a lot more, but that gives the essence of it. And the first time I read this, I didn't like it at all because picking and choosing is really important to me. From very basic things like what kind of drink do you want before we came into the shrine room, to what kind of career do you want, to who do you want to be in relationship with, um, to whether you want to stay in your job or not. It's really important to pick and choose things in that sense. So I sat with this for quite a while, and it occurred to me, oh, it's actually about meditation practice, or it's about our inner worlds, or it's about not excluding things from being true. That is, allowing what is true to be true. Because that's the tendency we have, isn't it? I don't really want to acknowledge this, so I'll pretend it isn't happening. I don't like this about myself, so I will just pretend it's not true. Or I prefer to think of myself in this way, so I will think of myself in this way, even though actually I'm this sort of person. And the same for things in the world, from saying, you know, things like, it'll never happen to me, uh, about encountering old age, sickness, birth, and death. And then like, oh, okay, I guess those things will happen to me. You're not allowed to pick and choose what's are real. You can have some choice about how you respond to what's real. Oh, this is the sort of person I am. I wonder where I go from here. There's an old joke, isn't there? And you can kind of insert the sort of oppressed minority of choice depending on which era the joke is being told in. But one person says to the other, how do you get to such and such a place? And the reply is, well, I wouldn't start from here. But you know, we have to start from here. So this is also the beginner's mind, the mind that starts at the beginning, the mind that starts here. Some of us are reading Tom Holmes's Parts Work at the moment, you know, and Self energy is beginner's mind, because when we're in what IFS call self energy, the mind that is compassionate and spacious and enjoys connection, it is able to witness all the other parts without reacting, without wanting to push them away, or without wanting to pull them closer. Just noticing, oh, the angry one's here, the inner critic's here, the destructor's here. The vulnerable ones here. And from this place of noticing, you can make a much wiser choice than being caught in the angry one, for example. And of course, that description of not pulling things closer and not pushing them away, uh, could also come from a medieval Japanese meditation manual, to sit, uh, like a mountain and notice the clouds coming past without moving closer to them, without moving further away from them. When I first encountered Buddhism, there was quite a lot of talk and spirituality in generally, and I don't see this so much now, but there was quite a lot of talk that the ideal state of mind to be in was the child's state of mind. I don't quite know where that came from. And there's, there are lots of good things about that, that sense of wonder, uh, that sense of inquisitiveness, the sense of joy and ease and sensitivity to what's happening around them. Those are all really good qualities, but children are also, uh, They're completely— well, maybe not completely blank states, but they've still got a lot to learn. Usually they don't quite know how the world works, what all of the rules are, you know, what the meaning of things is. Most of— maybe partly this is why I don't like it— most of my childhood from a very, very young age was spent in a state of confusion. Which is not, did not feel like in life. In my life, I don't know how to engage with this group of people. I don't know what you are talking about. I don't know what this means. Um, but the beginner's mind captures those positive qualities, but it doesn't throw away knowledge and experience and wisdom. It respects them without being a slave to them. Just like in the famous Kalama Sutta. I looked down then because I thought, is it Kalama or have I slightly dyslexically muddled up some of those letters?. And as I looked down, I thought, I'm a person who wrote that word. It doesn't matter. Like, it won't matter if I look at it because it may— if it's wrong in here, it's also wrong down here. I'm pretty sure it's the Kalama Sutta. It's very well known. It's the one where the Buddha goes to the Kalamas, which I think is the people that lived in Kalama, like Malvernites, I guess. They were the Kalamas. And they were really confused about how to know whether a teacher or a teaching was valuable. Bear in mind, like, the sense I get from reading things like, uh, Karen Armstrong's book about the Buddha, which is very good, and there's, uh, there's a biography by someone from in Triratna, which is, uh, very good as well in terms of filling out the detail of the time that the Buddha lived in. You couldn't swing a cat in the Indian jungle without hitting a spiritual teacher. Lots of people had done what the Buddha had done. He wasn't unique in that sense. And you know, not many of those traditions survive today. The Jains do and the Buddhas do. And a lot of what other people were teaching got reincorporated back into some Hinduism, I think you could argue. But there were lots of them, and lots of them are name-checked in the Buddhist sutras. Obviously the five teachers that the Buddha studied with, and they all had little gangs of disciples with them. And clearly some of these had passed through Kalama, and they were teaching different things. And these guys are like, well, how are we supposed to know whether what this one says is right, or what this one, or you're telling us the opposite now, you know. Is there a self? Isn't there a self? Is it— are we— is, is our essence impermanent or permanent? What actions constitute good and bad karma? You know, what are we— how are we supposed to make offerings? And the Buddha's answer was essentially, well, just try it out and see what works. And this When I first encountered Buddhism, this was like all over the place. Western Buddhists love this because it, for those of us that had been damaged by other religious communities, partly because we were told you must accept everything that we are teaching you, what a balm to be told actually you don't have to accept everything that we're teaching you. You can try it out and see if it works. And if you read the whole sutra, The Buddha says, respect wise teachers. And who are wise teachers? They're teachers who walk the walk. Like, they teach it's good to be kind, and you look at them and think, oh yeah, they're pretty kind actually. They're not the ones who teach it's good to be kind and you think, oh well, actually mostly they're not kind, or whatever it is. So pay attention to people whose words match their actions. So you— there's room for expertise, but we don't rely on it. Once you've got a sense of, okay, yeah, there's something, something that seems interesting or useful here, now I'll try it out. I'll try out this meditation practice. I'll try thinking about impermanence in this way. I'll try doing a gratitude list. Before bed every week and see what difference it makes. I'll try saying the Nembutsu and see what difference it makes. And you find out, uh, and there's something in this about beginner's mind for me as well. Real permission to take in and taste for yourself what is— yeah, what's the right food for the moment. And that means this kind of open attention, and it means this very close kind of attention, both working together. The postmodern theater director Anne Bogart, who worked in Canada, used to teach her actors an exercise. It reminds me of something you described actually that you were learning in yoga, this very soft focus where you pay attention to the periphery of things. And that this is kind of the place that the home base, if you like, in the rehearsal studio. And then you have a sense of this is where all the different people are. This is how the lights are. And then as you step into, uh, relationship with a particular individual, if that's what the show calls for, the attention changes and focuses on this kind of more single-pointed focus. And my sense is that, that You know, a lot of Buddhism teaches us how to do single-pointed concentration, but we're actually very good at that already because we're singly pointed on our phones or TV or the radio. Or, you know, people talk about attention spans are getting shorter. I don't think they are getting shorter. I think we're just paying attention to different things. We're very good at paying attention to things that capture our attention. How long can you stay scrolling on Twitter for? Can I stay scrolling on Twitter for? I came off just before Christmas, but a very long time, you know, that single-pointed concentration. The invitation of beginner's mind is to step back into that sense of spaciousness and notice what else is here, so that when you step forward, It's from a place of wisdom, from a place of including everything that's here and making a choice that is, uh, yeah, that comes out of the sense of many possibilities, not just the few. Maybe I should say something about beginner's mind. Nenbutsu. What would that look like, I wonder? Well, two things come to mind. The first is Shinran saying, when someone asked him about his— why have you chosen the nenbutsu? Do you really think it works? He's like, well, I don't think I could get You know, I think whatever other practice I did, I would be bound for hell. And I might even be bound for hell if I follow Honen, but this is the thing that I've chosen to trust. And normally when you read that quote, it's said more eloquently than I've just said it. But there's a sense of, I don't know, that is a simple way of saying it, I guess. I've chosen this. I trust it. I don't know where the end point is. Like we used to say in the old service, to be reborn in the Pure Land without even knowing what the Pure Land is, or without really knowing what the Pure Land is. Like, we have a sense or a scent or a taste of, oh, there's something here that, that seems to I have some sense of positivity about it, of loving kindness about it, but it's not exactly clear where it's leading me or what it means or where I'm going to end up. But I decide to follow it anyway. That's the kind of beginner's mind, like taking the first step on a journey. Like, I might have decided that I'm going to walk from one side of the country to the other. But that's not guaranteed when I start out. And actually, um, the beginner's mind is one that continually trusts that as long as I keep taking a good footstep, I will end up somewhere interesting. And maybe I'll get caught up, uh, and go a different direction because something more interesting happens, or I meet somebody, or trusting that process to unfold in a, in a positive way. So I think that's enough words. The Great Way is not difficult. Just avoid picking and choosing neither love nor hate. And by love here, I, I take it to mean like craving, not open-hearted, you know, non-agenda loving kindness. Neither craving nor aversion, and you will clearly understand. Missing it is like, uh, by even a hair's breadth, and suddenly you are as far away from it as between the distance between heaven and earth. And if you've ever been caught in a path that has an agenda, uh, It doesn't take— it takes less than a moment to be caught by something and to go into a reactive state. But when you're in that reactive state, you're a far— you could be, you know, you're 100 million miles away from loving kindness. So I do quite like that. I did once translate that text myself, which was either an act of beginner's mind or great hubris, because I don't speak Chinese. Although I did have a dictionary, so it wasn't, you know, completely foolish. Yeah. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few. We could say in the Buddha's mind, there are many possibilities. In the foolish mind, there are few. Namok ami jabu.
