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Friday, June 13, 2025

Always a Beginner

In a beginner’s mind we have many possibilities, but in an expert’s mind there are not many possibilities. So, in our practice the important thing is to resume our original mind, or our inmost mind, which even we ourselves do not know what it is. This is the most important thing for us. The founder of our school emphasized this point. We have to remain always with beginner’s mind. And this is the secret of Zen, and the secret of flower arrangement, Japanese singing, and various arts.

cuke.com/ig for links to the source of the image. Excerpt from Shunryu Suzuki lecture 65-11-11 as found on shunryusuzuki.com, edited by PF. These posts are also on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram. We are continually working on improving the quality of transcriptions of Suzuki's lectures. After a new "verbatim transcript" is made, we create a minimally edited version which is more readable. See the most recently completed transcripts at shunryusuzuki.com/n.