What have we changed our minds about?

cuke.com - an archival site on the life and world of Shunryu Suzuki and those who knew him and anything else DC feels like - originally a site for Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

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6-28-08 - Katrinka was looking through the summer issue of Tricycle and came upon the feature, The Question: From reincarnation to reading Proust, seventeen Buddhists tell us what they’ve changed their minds about, and why (p50). She said she'd look for what I sent. I forgot I'd submitted something and said I didn't know what she was talking about. But then I found it in my files and today I find it on Tricycle's site along with others who didn't make the magazine cut - like John Tarrant - Oh, that reminds me, I've got to pick him up at the airport tomorrow. Here are John's and mine. So here are what John and I submitted copied off the Tricycle site. They asked for a brief biographical sentence and to keep it to 250 words.

JOHN TARRANT directs Pacific Zen Institute, which is devoted to koan Zen and the arts. He is the author of Bring me the Rhinoceros and Other Koans

I think this is a good question. The best answer I can come up with is that I don't have a mind to change. I've changed my mind about having a mind.

DAVID CHADWICK writes, “I have a website named cuke.com that covers Shunryu Suzuki, those who knew him, and anything else I feel like, and which provides an extensive elaboration on this brief biographical sentence.”

The most recent thing that I've changed my mind about in Buddhism involves this email response to Tricycle’s query because when I first read about the Edge.org question and Tricycle's Buddhist version, I thought, oh that would be a fun thing to answer, provocative as well. I started thinking about what my answer would be while continuing to read the email, simultaneously pondering, multitasking as it were, various past fluctuations of belief and practices, resulting from teachings, readings, epiphanies, and so forth. My thought stream contained flashes such as takes on my basic belief that belief itself is a trance to be discarded like a straight jacket, and that practices, if seen as means, are hopeless. I wondered such things as, well, what is Buddhist? Would answering this question be considered Buddhist and I thought it could be, and that was about when I read that the response should be 250 words and I’d had in mind to write something much briefer, pithy, so I decided not to answer it which was a sort of Buddhist change of mind but now that I’ve written this I realize that mind’s changed again about something in the Buddhist realm for this is exactly 250 words if you count the biographical sentence and the number 250 as one word.