‘And when you sit, your practice should be done with the spirit like, if someone, you know, tell you to stand up, you shouldn’t stand up forever. Until someone, you know, say, stand up. This much confidence is necessary.
It means you sit right in the center of the earth, of the world, or universe, whatever it is. And you are right in the point of the eternal time. If you have some idea of space or time, that practice is not true practice. You should be always sitting in cross-point of time and space. That is true practice. And this is very important, because this practice of — this practice, which is beyond the idea of time and space, accord with the true teaching of Buddhism.
To live on this moment, on this point, moment after moment, is how to actualize our teaching. So when you sit in this way, there you have the true teaching of Buddhism. The gist of the teaching. The point of the teaching. Here you have the oneness of teaching and practice; and oneness of enlightenment and practice.
So, this much, at least this much, confidence is necessary. When you fix your mind, and practice our way, there you have renunciation. You have the true feeling of Zen. This practice — when you practice this — in this way, we say you resume your original face, or original nature.’ (from the Suzuki Roshi archives)
This is one of the talks I worked on a certain amount, from the first summer at Tassajara in 1967. The original reel was much better quality than previous copies had been, so it was possible to clean up the transcript a little. I listened to it again with my dharma sister Kim last week, and a couple of things struck me: the talk offers one of the most extensive zazen instructions that Suzuki Roshi gave, which is great to listen to in itself, and it is bookended by more philosophical musings which, it occurred to me as I listened, he may have been reading out from prepared remarks. Certainly there were a lot of technical terms, and his cadence is a little different to what it usually seems to be. Kim noted his referencing to time and space, similarly to how Katagiri Roshi expressed it later, and which she hopes to talk about from the dharma seat in a few weeks.
Shundo David Haye 