A story of less than 100 words once restored my dwindling faith and kept me on the Path.
I have had about a year of meditation practice by then, and even went on a short retreat to deepen my practice. The events at that retreat, however, had left me extremely confused. While my heart was stilled by the quietness of the small temple and the peaceful countryside where we practiced, I also discovered serious moral lapses in the monastics we studied with, and even more painfully, in my fellow retreatant, who was one of my closest friends and who first introduced me to Buddhism.
Months after that retreat, after distancing myself from these teachers and my friend, I still harbored doubt and frustration – in myself, in the practitioners who I had been looking up to, and in the Path itself. I would catch myself feeling angry at these teachers and blame myself for not practicing well enough to forgive. I would find myself still wanting to earn recognition from these teachers and blame myself for not practicing well enough to separate emotionally from them. And on and on. I was getting tired of this meditation thing. What’s there to aspire towards when you are feeling disillusioned and disappointed by the very people whom you look up to?
It was during an afternoon of being plagued with these thoughts that I wandered in my college bookstore, hoping for a distraction. I pulled a book out from the spirituality shelf, not even bothering to check the title that closely, and opened it at random. This was the first thing I read:
At a Sokoji lecture, a distraught woman said she had been rejected by a Zen teacher in Los Angeles. Suzuki Roshi told her that if she went back to that teacher he would accept her.
“Now you reject me,” she cried.
“Oh no,” Suzuki said, with sincere sympathy in his voice, “you can stay here.” And with his arms open and long robe sleeves gracefully hanging at his sides, he took a step toward her and added, “I never reject anybody.”
Something in me shifted. I could feel the teacher’s compassion coming through the page. He did not reject anybody, so there must also be room on this Path for me: this imperfect being simmering with anger and resentment and frustration just moments earlier. I checked the book’s title – it was “Zen is Right Here: Teaching Stories and Anecdotes of Shunryu Suzuki, Author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.” I bought the book, and eventually Shunryu Suzuki’s more famous “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” too.
Slowly, my motivation to practice returned, fed by the inspiration from Shunryu Suzuki’s lectures and his way of living and teaching as told by his students. I even started to make time for sitting meditation everyday, not skipping even if I had to sit at 2 a.m after staying up late to finish my college coursework.
It took more time and help from others to process my first retreat experience, and I can now look back and feel grateful to the teachers at that retreat. Not for their hurtful actions, which I do not condone, but for teaching me to be cautious on the Path as I encounter other traditions and teachers, and for, however imperfectly, watering the seeds of commitment to meditation practice that set me on my own journey.
This experience is also one of the motivations for me to write. (The main motivation, though, is that I enjoy it and would do it even if no one’s reading 😉) When Shunryu Suzuki told his visitor “I never reject anybody,” did he know those very words would help a struggling Zen student on the opposite side of the country, almost 50 years after his passing? Who knows how far your words will reach?
