Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness

The "Sandokai" - a poem by the 8th-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 meditations instruction.