Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Published in 1970, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is a compilation of talks by the Sōtō Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki, who taught Zen Buddhism in the United States, mainly in the 1960s, and founded its first Zen Buddhist monastery. Throughout these talks, he emphasizes the practice of zazen, the discipline of sitting meditation. The book is not so much a philosophical or intellectual discussion on the meaning and history of Zen but rather a guide on the precepts of practice. “Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain," he says. "Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.” To borrow Suzuki's metaphor, there's a cornucopia of food in this roughly 175-page book. About those just starting to practice zazen he tells us that "The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities."

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is divided into three parts: "Right Practice," "Right Mind," and "Right Understanding." Suzuki teaches that “in the proper way with the right attitude and understanding of practice, then that is Zen. The main point is to practice seriously, and the important attitude is to understand and have confidence in big mind.”

Reading the talks had a calming effect on me, maybe because they're given in a sort of zazen manner—unembellished, and also methodical, and like a stream, as they were spoken. The book also brims with insight and wisdom, and with drops of humor now and then as well. For anyone reading books in English to understand Zen, or who are practicing zazen, this one should be at the top of their pile.

Tokyo Vice

Journalist Jake Adelstein's Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a remarkable achievement on a number of fronts. Here you've got a guy who comes to Tokyo to study at Sophia University (in the early 90s), lands a job reporting in Japanese for the Yomiuri Shinbun, works round the clock to make connections and eke out information at police branches and on various strata of the underworld, and gets the stories out there in the face of media red tape and threats of reprisal to himself, family and friends.

Having lived in Tokyo for about as many years as Adelstein, I remember quite a few of the cases he covered. His book filled in plenty of blanks, and as disturbing as some of his experiences and possible lapses of judgement were, I have a lot of respect for what he's been able to accomplish. Surprised I haven't run into him over the years in one of Tokyo's seedier warrens, and I look forward to reading more of his work.

The Inland Sea

The Inland Sea is a 1991 documentary-style film by Lucille Carra and an adaptation of Donald Richie's 1971 travelogue of the same name. Only fifty-six minutes long, it is premised on Richie's notion that, “One is meant to wander, turning at random along these straight and open corridors filled with the rustling of the forest, the whispering of the sea.” We're thus taken on a journey, mirroring Richie's travels, rich observations, and roaming contemplation, a version that is faithful while also on its own narrative and visual quest—"a bit of shooting around” as Richie noted. We can expect this, of course, as Richie's book was published twenty years prior, in 1971, pieced together from journal entries penned in the years before that, on his various trips to the sea and its countless islands. Much of what he had experienced there and seen, and those he encountered, would've been difficult to find; Richie back then was well aware things were changing rapidly and that much would soon be gone or lost, or transformed by a modern Japan and world.

What I particularly like is the film's dream-like atmosphere and tone. Several of the book's most memorable parts are narrated by Richie, infusing a loosely-connected, poetic context into the imagery and its textures. Richie's gentle, nasal voice, often plaintive as he reads, lends to the film's romantically languid essence and the feeling that everything within is flowing and passing, the water, sky, landscapes, people, animals, architecture and culture. The past into the present into the inevitable but unknown future—a future which, Richie might have lamented, would be wholly unsympathetic to what once was. It is a film one can be absorbed into—its steady, mild current—to drift through a time decades ago, harkening back to a time decades before that, when Richie wandered on a journey of self-discovery.