Branching Streams Flo in the Darkness Zen Talks on the Sandokai [Paperback]

When Shunryu Suzuki Roshi'sZen Mind, Beginner's Mindwas published in 1972, it was enthusiastically embraced by Westerners eager for spiritual insight and knowledge of Zen. The book became the most successful treatise on Buddhism in English, selling more than one million copies to date.Branching Streams Flow in the Darknessis the first follow-up volume to Suzuki Roshi's important work. LikeZen Mind, Beginner's Mind, it is a collection of lectures that reveal the insight, humor, and intimacy with Zen that made Suzuki Roshi so influential as a teacher.

TheSandokaia poem by the eighth-century Zen master Sekito Kisen (Ch. Shitou Xiqian)is the subject of these lectures. Given in 1970 at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the lectures are an example of a Zen teacher in his prime elucidating a venerated, ancient, and difficult work to his Western students. The poem addresses the question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist (or, as Suzuki Roshi expresses it, things-as-it-is ). Included with the lectures are his students' questions and his direct answers to them, along with a meditation instruction. Suzuki Roshi's teachings are valuable not only for those with a general interest in Buddhism but also for students of Zen practice wanting an example of how a modern master in the Japanese Soto Zen tradition understands this core text today.

Shunryu Suzuki Roshicame to the United States in 1959, leaving his temple in Yaizu, Japan, to serve as priest for the Japanese American congregation at Sokoji Temple in San Francisco. In 1967 he and his students created the first Zen Buddhist monastery in America at Tassajara in the coastal mountains south of San Francisco. Suzuki Roshi died in 1971 at age 67, a year and a half after delivering his teaching on theSandokai. He may have had a premonition of his coming death when he said that it was common for Zen teachers in the Soto tradition to llÓp