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Friday, July 3, 2020

Back when Suzuki gave these Lotus Sutra Lectures.

Shunryu Suzuki gave three sets of lectures on the Lotus Sutra. Four of them, including this one, from this second series were edited and made into the contents of an entire Wind Bell by Tim Buckley. Brian Fikes did minimum edits and got them all together in loose leaf binders for the libraries. They can be accessed together by going to shunryusuzuki.com's Suzuki Lecture Search Form and selecting Lotus Sutra in the Subject dropdown and hitting Enter. I am not advising anyone to do this, just letting you know. 

To many of us, they were the most tedious and boring lectures that Suzuki gave. It was like, "Oh no, he's not going to do that again is he?" I tried to talk him out of doing more of them. This one so far reads okay but it wasn't like reading this. Maybe this was a more interesting and comprehendable lecture. Sometimes he'd go on and on reading from it. I asked if maybe we could read it in study period and then he could just improvise on it and maybe that had some effect but not that i recall. Now it seems alright to read but back then it was not like his teaching, just him reading and talking about some old mythical approach. There were others who were more appreciative, probably who were already familiar with the Lotus Sutra and who were less scatterbrained. I just couldn't read more than a few pages of it without turning to something else. End of confessional. - dc