304 CHAPTER TWELVEand logic, and that had obvious parallels with Buddhist and Hindu teachings
on the nature of the mind. These were among the main factors leading to an
explosion of interest in the possibility of unconditioned experience to be
found within the mind, and two Asian Buddhist teachers came to America in
time to direct part of the force of this explosion into the practice of Buddhist
meditation.
One of these teachers was Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (not to be confused with
D. T. Suzuki), a priest of the S6t6 Zen tradition who founded the San Fran-
cisco Zen Center in the early 1960s. His teachings made it clear to his stu-
dents that many of the formalities of So to practice were not mere cultural
baggage, but had an intrinsic relationship to the attainment of what he called
Big Mind. Suzuki-roshi's concept ofBig Mind-as explained in his book Zen
Mind, Beginner's Mind (1970)-referred to the innate oneness of consciousness
from which all beings are born and to which all return after death. The pur-
pose of meditation, he said, was to realize the perspective of Big Mind in all
one's activities and perceptions so as to be able to maintain one's composure in
the midst of change and to be open to the innate perfection of each moment
as it passed. The image with which he illustrated this concept was Yosemite
Falls. The drops of water leave the oneness of the river as they fall over the
rock ledge, only to rejoin that oneness at the bottom of the cliff; Zen enables
one to remain upright through the interval of separation and fall. Thus the
freedom offered by Zen was one to be found within the world, and not by es-
caping it. Although Suzuki-roshi insisted that the insights of Zen were radi-
cally different from those induced by psychedelic drugs, some Americans
could see in his depiction of meditation a safe, disciplined method for stabiliz-
ing mental states that they had already encountered in their exposure to psy-
chedelic substances.
Although he stressed the necessity of the formalities of Zen practice,
Suzuki-roshi declined to establish an ethical code for his students, on the ra-
tionale that ethics were relative to culture. Such a code, he said, would have to
be developed gradually over time through trial and error, as Western practi-
tioners applied the perspective of Big Mind to the affairs of their daily life.
Again, even though Suzuki-roshi insisted that Americans might end up need-
ing more rules than the Japanese, his general ethical relativism had an obvious
appeal to the generation that had pushed through the revolution in American
sexual mores.
The other teacher who had a large impact on the spread of Buddhism at
this time, Chogyam Trungpa, took an even more radical approach to the ques-
tion of ethics. Trained in the Tibetan Ri-med (Unrestricted) movement (see
Section 11.4), Trungpa viewed ethical norms as part of the "bureaucracy of
the ego" that meditation was intended to overthrow. As was the case with
both Suzukis, he taught that the purpose of meditation was to attain intensi-
fied perception in this life, freed from the strictures of the ordinary mind, al-
though-following his Dzogchen training-he viewed this level of perception
as a realization of the light innate in all things. His proposed method of attain-
ing this free mode of perception was a typically Tibetan emphasis on the cen-