Shunryu Suzuki 
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness 
Zen Talks on the Sandokai

When Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date.
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness is the first follow-up volume to Suzuki Roshi’s important work. Like
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made Suzuki Roshi so influential as a teacher.


The
Sandokai—a poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian)—is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as Suzuki Roshi expresses it, ‚things-as-it-is‘). Included with the lectures are his students‘ questions and his direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. Suzuki Roshi’s teachings are valuable not only for those with a general interest in Buddhism but also for students of Zen practice wanting an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text today.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


INTRODUCTION

Mel Weitsman


SEKITO KISEN AND THE SANDOKAI

Michael Wenger


NOTES TO THE READER


THE SANDOKAI

English Translation

Chinese Text and Japanese Transliteration


FIRST TALK

Things-As-It-Is


SECOND TALK

Warm Hand to Warm Hand


THIRD TALK

Buddha Is Always Here


FOURTH TALK

The Blue Jay Will Come Right into Your Heart


FIFTH TALK

Today We May Be Very Happy


SIXTH TALK

The Boat Is Always Moving


SEVENTH TALK

Without Any Idea of Attainment


EIGHTH TALK

Within Light There Is Utter Darkness


NINTH TALK

The Willow Tree Cannot Be Broken


TENTH TALK

Suffering Is a Valuable Thing


A SHORT TALK DURING ZAZEN


ELEVENTH TALK

We Should Not Stick to Words or Rules


TWELFTH TALK

Do Not Pass Your Days and Nights in Vain


TALK GIVEN TO A VISITING CLASS

We Are Just a Tiny Speck of Big Being


THE SANDOKAI

Compiled Translation by Suzuki Roshi


LINEAGE CHART OF TEACHERS

MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

Über den Autor

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi came to the United States in 1959, leaving his temple in Yaizu, Japan, to serve as priest for the Japanese American congregation at Sokoji Temple in San Francisco. In 1967 he and his students created the first Zen Buddhist monastery in America at Tassajara in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco. Suzuki Roshi died in 1971 at age 67, a year and a half after delivering his teaching on the Sandokai. He may have had a premonition of his coming death when he said that it was common for Zen teachers in the Soto tradition to lecture on the Sandokai near the end of life.Mel Weitsman is the former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and current abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. Michael Wenger is Dean of Buddhist Studies at the San Francisco Zen Center.