Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘When you make your own zazen to live as an expression of its own full function, you don’t sit in meditation. Zazen is doing zazen. So you should sit in the right middle of the universe. Don’t lose your composure. Don’t be so hasty. Don’t look back. Don’t look every direction.’ (from the Katagiri Roshi Archive)

Recently in our archive work, we were going through and publishing talks that we had imported as part of the Suzuki Roshi Archive project, but had set aside; talks from the other teachers at Zen Center were sometimes on the same reel of tape as those by Suzuki Roshi, especially in the earliest recorded sesshins from 1965 and 1966. This is one of the earliest talks we have by Dainin Katagiri, who had come from Japan to help with the Zen Center project; his English was still somewhat limited at this point, but the clarity of his expression was already fully developed.