March 29th, 1970
Sunday, March 29th, 1970Shunryū Suzuki-rōshi
ZAZEN IS LIKE GOING TO THE RESTROOM
Sunday, March 29, 1970
San Francisco
Listen to this talk: Suzuki-roshi 70-03-29
How do you feel now? [Laughs.] Excuse me. I thought of funny thing right now [laughs]. I feel as if, you know—I don’t know how you feel, but I feel as if I—I have finished, you know, things in restroom [laughs]. As I am pretty old, you know, I go to restroom so often. Even when I was young, I went [to] restroom more than, you know [laughs], usual person. I had, I think, some advantage, you know [laughs, laughter], because of that. When I went to tan- [partial word]—Eihei-ji and sit in tangaryō,[1] for seven days [laughs], I could go to restroom without any guilty conscience because I had to [laughs, laughter]. I was so happy [laughs, laughter] to go to restroom. I think someth- [partial word]—to go to restroom is something to do, you know [laughs, laughter], with our practice.
Ummon[2] may be the first one to make some connection between our practice and restroom. “What is our practice?” Or “What is buddha?”—someone asked him.[3] He said, you know, “toilet paper”—no, not toilet paper. Nowadays it is toilet paper, but he says [laughing, laughter], “something to scratch your—scratch yourself after you—after finishing restroom.” That is what he said. And since then, you know, many Zen masters [are] thinking about or practicing on that kōan: What is toilet paper? [Laughs.] What he meant by it?
Anyway, our practice is closely related to our everyday life. Physiologically it may be—our—to go to—we go—we have to go to restroom, but psychologically I think we have to practice zazen. In our everyday life, we, you know, eat many things, good and bad: something fancy or something simple, something tasty or something tasteless like water.