1 or 1000 makes no difference: Suzuki Roshi sublimely defeated

kaz and i decided one day to write a book called "sublime defeat." we wrote down some stories and finally did nothing. i guess the project was defeated. but i recently found the manuscript, so the story below is from the collection as is this story about suzuki roshi.

One or One Thousand People Makes No Difference

We often get discouraged when we are invited to teach and there are only a few people who show up. So this is a story that is a good reminder that it does not matter the number of people who come to you to learn and practice. Zen Master Dogen had only one dharma heir and a small number of senior students in his lifetime. Now his dharma descendents are all over Japan and beyond. He also founded the Soto School, the largest Buddhist congregation in Japan.

And this might not have happened to Dogen. Dogen could have been forgotten; your good work may make no difference. One or one thousand or none………..

When you feel you don’t have enough people and when you are discouraged, you might want to remember the following story about Suzuki Roshi telling his wife Mitsu that one or one thousand people is the same. Sometimes in life this happens, what we are calling sublime defeat.

Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen priest from Japan arrived in San Francisco in 1962. As a Zen priest, he had been asked to take care of the Japanese Zen congregation of Sokoji Temple. The temple, located in a run down Victorian building, was a bit tired and dusty. Its hall was dark and hollow. Its façade hardly Japanese in feeling.

Being a Zen monk, he practiced meditation every morning. However, none of his temple members joined him. A very common division exists between temple priests and members who support a temple. Priests hopefully practice meditation but members often don’t.

One day, some young Americans approached him and asked him if he would teach them meditation. He said “yes,” and some of these people started coming to Sokoji to join Suzuki Roshi for meditation. Now, some of Sokoji’s Japanese temple members were not so happy with this. They thought that these young people, these beatniks, were not so conventional, not so clean, their feet were not very nice. Maybe the Japanese members did not feel very comfortable with their temple being occupied by young Americans.

For Roshi, it was a surprise that lay people were asking to practice, since lay people in Japan are not suppose to be serious practitioners. In the United States, with it s young society, those people who are seen as not properly dressed, a ragged bunch of enthusiastic youth, those people who don’t look so good, it was they who saw Roshi’s true value. For them, he was not a priest who maintains a temple. They discovered him. The students were impressed with Suzuki Roshi’s ordinariness, this shaven headed short man with extraordinary presence. And students make a teacher great. Without students, there is no teacher.

Two years later, his wife joined him in San Francisco. Mrs. Suzuki was asked to join Suzuki Roshi in America, because maybe Roshi felt American women were a little too dangerous. He also wanted her to help with temple matters. Mrs. Suzuki was a former kindergarten teacher and was also very outspoken, unlike many Japanese women. So she would say whatever she felt. This was a great strength.

Suzuki Roshi would give lectures every Wednesday morning after zazen Often few people attended. One day, Mrs. Suzuki peeped into the Buddha Hall when Suzuki Roshi was lecturing, and she was quite discouraged that so few people were there for her husband’s talks. Later, she said to him: “Hojosan, I wish you had ten people. You know, you study so hard preparing your lectures. You use a dictionary to find the right English word. You work so diligently and really not so many people are here for you talks.”

Shunryu smiled and said, “One person, one thousand people, there is no difference.”

Soon Suzuki Roshi was invited by a group of students in Mountain View, who practiced meditation in one of the member’s garage. The maximum capacity for that garage was seventeen seats. So Shunryu named the garaged Haiku Zendo after the seventeen syllables of the haiku poem form.

One of the people who was sitting with him in Mountain View in the Haiku Zendo garage was Frank, who was putting together some kind of machine in his own garage. He was meditating in one garage and working in another. So Frank was living a life between two garages. Later, he became the founder of one of the largest computer companies in the world. 

Roshi would go there once a week and give a lecture, which was recorded and transcribed. Later, some of his students put together these talks into a book. That is how the book Zen Mind, Beginners Mind came into being. So Suzuki Roshi was made by beatniks in a garage. This book has been translated in to twenty-five languages. Now maybe millions of people have read Roshi’s book.

But who has really realized Beginner’s Mind? We can reverse the idea about one and think about an audience of one thousand or one million. It might be possible that you will not have one person in an audience of one thousand or one million who will realize the teachings. We do not have to be happy having a great number of people. If you have just one person who carries on your vision and actualizes your work in the future for the service of others, this is perhaps what you really want. How wondrous that Mrs. Suzuki was there to remind her husband of defeat. She realized he was being defeated, and he realized that his defeat was sublime.