September 17, 2026

Keep Beginning

The goal of practice is always to keep our beginner's mind.

Shunryu Suzuki was a Japanese Zen priest who came to San Francisco in 1959 and found Americans eager to master Zen quickly, often treating practice like a skill to check off. His talks, later gathered into Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, kept returning students to shoshin, the beginner's mind that has not yet decided what it already knows. This line teaches that practice is not a ladder toward expert status; the goal is not to arrive but to keep the openness of someone just starting out. In Zen, this openness is trained through zazen, sitting with the same breath and the same wall day after day without treating them as already understood. The tradition holds that real skill is not accumulated certainty but the ongoing willingness to see plainly, without the crust of prior conclusions.

A principle of Eastern Wisdom: Beginner's Mind →