photo by Lisa Law

Brief Memories
of Shunryu Suzuki,
Zen Center
back then, etc.

 


Tim Buckley link page

Tim Buckley with Suzuki in his garden

from a letter sent to Richard Baker in the seventies.


Here’s one that I meant to give you after the first notice appeared in the last Wind Bell. I think of it as a sort of mondo that deals directly with suchness and attachment, but then...

One day at Tassajara I was with Suzuki Roshi in the rock garden that he was, at that time, still working on outside his cabin. (Did he ever stop?) In the slanting moon light the garden and its individual rocks seemed more beautiful than ever to me; magical.

"What a beautiful garden you've made!" I said to Roshi.

"Oh. If you like it so much, why don't you take it with you? You can have it."

"I don't think I could move it," I answered, perhaps intimidated by a particular gleam in his eye, "I'd never get it all back together again quite this way".

"Sure you take it", he said, "put it up on the roof of that cabin over there", and turned to his puttering in a patch of succulents.