One Time, One Meeting

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

According to a story told in Zen circles, a young Japanese priest, who had been invited to the San Francisco Zen Center to teach American students, came to the Center’s founder, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, with an urgent concern. His English was not so good, he explained, and he feared that the students would be unable to understand him.

In response, Suzuki invited the priest to attend one of his own talks the following morning. With the students formally assembled in the meditation hall, Suzuki entered, bowed, took his seat, and solemnly intoned three sentences, pausing between them. “Today is today,” said he. “Today is not yesterday. Today is not tomorrow.” With that, he rose, bowed, and left the hall.

Shortly thereafter, Suzuki spoke to the young priest, noting that in his talk he had used only five words. “That is all you need,” he explained, “to teach Zen.” Nonplussed but reassured, the young priest assumed his duties.

Suzuki, one suspects, was employing playful hyperbole to make a point, but in his three sentences he was also distilling a simple truth. However reductive, the five words he chose for his demonstration go to the heart of Zen. And the three sentences he formed from those words epitomize both a primary aim and a central challenge of Zen practice. As such, they deserve a closer look.

Today is today

In the discipline of academic philosophy, this sentence would be considered a tautology. Like the cliché “It is what it is,” the sentence reaffirms in its predicate what it has already established in its subject. Blue is blue. A cardinal is a cardinal. Today is today.

From the logician’s standpoint, tautologies are to be rigorously avoided, partly because they are redundant but also because they are verbal excrescences dressed up as thought. In form and sometimes in content, they resemble insights, but in reality they do little more than reiterate what has already been established. “As we get older, we do not get any younger,” Henry Reed’s parody of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, well illustrates the point.

Is “today is today” a mere tautology? Were the context different, one might conclude as much, but in the present context, Suzuki’s assertion has more in common with the adages “Boys will be boys” or “Enough is enough.” By repeating the word today, Suzuki calls attention to the “suchness”—the essential nature—of his subject. Today is today: it is unique, being unprecedented and unrepeatable. Rather than take it for granted, we would do well to lend it our full attention.

Today is not yesterday

If the first sentence appears tautological, this one might be dismissed as stating the obvious. But once again, the resonances of Suzuki’s assertion extend well beyond its literal meaning.

If it is so obvious that today is not yesterday, why do we spend so many of our waking moments recalling the past? Do not pursue the past, the Bhaddekaratta Sutta, an ancient Buddhist sutra, warns. To be sure, no one would reasonably argue that examining the past, in the disciplined fashion of a professional historian, is an ill-advised pursuit. Likewise, fond reminiscence, an activity to which we of a certain age are prone, has its place in the scheme of things. What the Buddha warns against is the habit of pursuing, reliving, and revising the past, to the extent that we forget what we are doing and where we presently are. With sufficient awareness we can explore the past while remembering that we are living in the present. Absent such awareness, however, we are treating today as if it were yesterday.

Today is not tomorrow

If the previous sentence cautions against retrospective wool-gathering, this one reminds us that living in the future can be as life-denying and delusive as “pursuing the past.”

Here again the Bhaddekaratta Sutta provides a gentle corrective. Do not lose yourself in the future, the sutra advises. That cautionary imperative should not be misconstrued as “Live (only) for today,” or “Let the future fend for itself.” Rather, it cautions against worrying at every turn about the future, or creating dire scenarios for whatever misfortunes may arise, or otherwise sacrificing the present for a time that has “not yet come.” And it also encourages, by implication, wholehearted attention to what is happening, within and without, in this very moment.

In circular fashion, “today is not tomorrow” returns us to Sukuki’s first sentence. As Thich Nhat Hanh has often remarked, life is available to us only in the present moment. If we are not present for that moment, we miss what he called our “appointment with life.” Today is today. Lest we forget, Suzuki’s five words, recalled periodically during the course of the day, can provide a potent reminder.

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