My friend Rod Mead Sperry asked whether I was interested in giving him a blurb for Susan Murphy’s new book Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary.” I said I’m a great admirer of Susan (she is a Dharma sister) but I’m extraordinarily busy right now. Still, I’d try to find time to read it. I fear I’m too late for the blurb, but I’ve just finished her book, and it is amazing. Quite simply Susan Murphy gives Zen a Western face with an Australian accent. And its right on! Not a false note throughout. She presents an understanding of Zen that is faithful to the tradition, but which is now deeply and truly our own. Which is, of course, exactly how Zen needs to be presented. She wiggles a finger at us, winks, and gently invites us into the ancient conspiracy. This is one of the best books on Zen one can hope to find. I hope it becomes a bestseller.
What follows are a smattering of quotes from the book, first from others, then from her.
“Jacques Lusseyrans, who became blind at the age of seven but found all of his senses, even vision, opening in an extraordinary way instead of closing down, said, ‘Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead. I have never had to go more than halfway, and the universe became an accomplice of all my wishes.’” P 8
“When the writer Thoreau was on his deathbed, a vistor asked him – from where you lie, so close to the brink of the dark river, can you say how the opposite shore looks to you? It is said that he replied, gently, ‘One world at a time.’” P 21
“In Japanese, ‘not always so’ is expressed in just two characters, in English it takes three words. Shunryu Suzuki liked to warn his students that the great secret of Zen lies in just two words, ‘Not always so.’ Truly, it cannot be counted.” P. 147
“The writer D.H. Lawrence said somewhere that you can get to heaven in a single leap but you will leave a devil in your place. It is like that. You can experience a sudden realization and begin to open the eye of insight, but if you hoped that might keep you safe from all subsequent human messiness and frailty, you will leave a devil in the very place you vacated for heaven.” She then adds, “The ‘devil’ is the energy of unacknowledged shadow.” P. 155
“Robert Aitken tells a story of (Hakuun) Yasutani Roshi’s last days. In the afternoon before Yasutani conducted the last precepts ceremony of his life, (his senior Dharma successor, Koun) Yamada Roshi came home and found him sitting in the living room. ‘How is your health these days?’ he asked him. ‘When I am sitting down it is all right, but when I stand I am very short of breath,’ was the reply. After the jukiai ceremony for, among others, both Ann and Robert Aitken (who would go on to become one of the most widely respected Western Zen masters), Yasutani stayed with his daughter. A few days later, he was dead. That night, at the first memorial service for him, Yamada gave teisho on this case: ‘How is your health these days?’ ‘When I stand I am very short of breath, ,but when I am sitting down it is all right.’ Sun-Face Buddha, Moon-Face Buddha.”
“Several years before, I had come in early summer, when it was still cool up in the high country, to see my sister after the operation. When I looked into her face for the first time since her life had turned I could see that she was now more consciously holding Sun-Face Buddha, Moon-Face Buddha, together in one face. Her eyes looked out at me with all her life and love and vulnerability. We both woke extremely early and found each other in the dark corridor at the center of her house, and in silent accord we made our way to take two chairs and a cup of tea to the big windows that face east. A slender moon in company with the morning star was slowly losing itself into a sky that was lightening by infinitesimal degrees. Gradually, gradually, the soft heads of the trees stepped out from the dark sky and announced themselves in some quality of the air that you couldn’t yet call light. We talked, and we sat in deep, companionable silence. We didn’t have a single trivial thing to say. We were so laid bare to each other, there was not a veil left between us. Or between us and the eternity of a fading moon. How long is a moon setting? How long is a sunrise?” pp 225-6
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