Basic info on Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu on Shunryu - interviews and lectures

Beginner's Mind lecture - oldest known version

Shunryu Suzuki Lectures on the Berkeley Zen Center web site

Footnotes may only appear in the edited versions. I just discovered that these formatted notes do not show up when I download the files from MS Word to Front Page. They will be included in these light edited versions from now on because they're inserted within brackets as text within the body of the lecture and not as formatted footnotes at the end. - DC

A Shunryu Suzuki lecture
light edit - the most recently posted

RYAKU FUSATSU LECTURE
Thursday Evening, July 29, 1971
Zen Mountain Center

Go to the verbatim, unedited, version of this lecture.

Shunryu Suzuki lecture on Whole Body Zazen

A few quotes from Shunryu Suzuki's lectures  
as found in Crooked Cucumber

Quotes from Shunryu Suzuki on Transmission

Shunryu Suzuki on War and Peace

Correspondence written by Suzuki

Some Suzuki quotes found on the net

Go to Suzuki Stories for more
and Brief Memories

Go to Basic info on Shunryu Suzuki - bio, chronology etc

Shunryu Suzuki Lectures

The archives of the San Francisco Zen Center currently includes about 400 Shunryu Suzuki lectures on tape and\or in print. They are currently being worked on so that a complete set of verbatim transcripts will exist [see ARCHIVE]. That was written in 1999 or so. Now there are many lectures available at the SFZC to read in verbatim and edited form. The job is mostly done. 

At present only a relatively small number of Suzuki's lectures are available for the public outside of Zen Center and affiliated libraries. He wished for them to be edited before they were published but more and more his unedited lectures are available. And a lightly edited version of a new lecture is put on this site about every month [June, 2004]. There are several sources where lectures edited by Shunryu Suzuki's students can be found.

The most famous source is "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," but there are two other books of Suzuki lectures: Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness and Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen (Amazon link) which is more in the vein of ZMBM. Another source known to the Buddhist world is the bi-annual Wind Bell, publication of the SFZC (300 Page St., San Francisco CA 94102)[$3 per issue; $6 a year domestic; $10 a year foreign] and there are publications of other Zen Centers, especially the Berkeley Zen Center. 

Also, the book of Wind Bell excerpts has a number of lectures by Suzuki Roshi. Wenger, Michael & Erlich, Gretel (Editors) Wind Bell: Teachings from the San Francisco Zen Center - 1968-2001 (web link) North Atlantic Books, 2001. [That was an informative link on it, but here's the Amazon.com link. A great collection of various articles, including Suzuki lectures, from old Wind Bells. There - took that right from the bibliography of this site.

And a few audio tapes of Shunryu Suzuki lectures are available. Write to the Zen Center, 300 Page St., San Francisco, CA 94102. or call 415-863-3136. Not sure as of 3/03 which email is best. Try <publications@sfzc.org>.

A couple of other sources are currently offering audio cassette tapes of his lectures. www.Amazon.com,  http://www.mysticfire.com/ and I understand http://www.audiowisdom.com/ but that didn't work for me. It led to a page with no links. I think there are more lectures available and will try to get a more complete and easy to read thing done up on this in the future.-DC]

Wind Bell: Teachings from the San Francisco Zen Center - 1968-2001 (go to bibliography for more info) -- by Michael Wenger (Editor), Gretel Erlich, North Atlantic Books has some Suzuki Roshi lectures in it. Here's the Amazon.com link which will give you more info on it

"Branching Steams Flow in the Darkness: Lectures on the Sandokai," University of California Press, Berkeley, is now available. [go to the Bibliography. More details will be printed here about how to buy or otherwise have access to Shunryu Suzuki lectures.-DC]

If you know where any Shunryu Suzuki lecture tapes or transcripts are, the SFZC Archive Project would love to make copies of them so that all who are interested can share. Contact the Archivist at the Zen Center (300 Page St., San Francisco, CA 94102) - zcarchives@aol.com. [A part time job not always filled] If they don't answer please tell me! [no one there for years now - 5/07

Recently [mid nineties] some old lecture tapes and even several boxes of old Suzuki-roshi tapes have been located. In each case the Zen Center offered to replace them with good copies, more suitable for listening. Old transcripts, some of lost lectures, have also been found. One whole group of lecture tapes that are missing are the original 7" reel to reel tapes of Suzuki's lectures at Los Altos from which Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was compiled. I (DC) interviewed an old student who had Marian Derby's (Marian Mountain) original manuscript called "Beginner's Mind" which was used as a model for the final book. In it Marian selected and lightly edited 21 lectures that Suzuki had given to students at her home\zendo in Los Altos. It's been lost for thirty years - not that anyone noticed - we're just starting to think about these things.

For more info on the creation of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and the Los Alto Zendo, see Crooked Cucumber, p.320-323 and 351-352, and the Chronicles of the Haiku Zendo in the Suzuki Stories section which I have posted here in full as it is unavailable except for in a few small libraries.

See Berkeley Zen Center abbot Mel Weitsman's Commentary on Suzuki Roshi's Sandokai Lectures

Basic info on Shunryu Suzuki