I originally read the phrase, shoshaku jushaku, in Shinryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. In the Marrow of Zen section, he states:

When we reflect on what we are doing in our everyday life, we are always ashamed of ourselves. One of my students wrote to me saying, ‘You sent me a calendar, and I am trying to follow the good mottoes which appear on each page. But the year has hardly begun, and already I have failed!’ Dogen-zenji said, ‘Shoshaku jushaku.’ Shaku generally means ‘mistake’ or ‘wrong.’ Shoshaku jushaku means ‘to succeed wrong with wrong,’ or one continuous mistake. According to  Dogen one continuous mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master’s life could be said to be so many years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded effort.

The first time I read this, I was struck. How could a Zen master, someone who is supposed to have mastered the art of living, live a life in continual error? It seemed to be a contradiction.

Shoshaku jushaku has stuck with me over the years like a kind of koan, engendering deeper and deeper reflection into its meaning and relation to my and others’ lives.

My first way of relating to it was quite literal. I encountered it at a time in my life when I felt I was making constant mistakes. I found some validation in knowing that even Zen masters made mistakes — apparently they could live lives full of them. So even if all I did was make mistakes, so long as I acted with a kind of single-minded sincerity, it didn’t necessarily mean I was straying from the path. It gave me space to fail, or rather, gave me permission to give myself space to fail. Framed another way, it was the tinder that ignited a nascent sense of self-compassion.

As time progressed and self-compassion deepened, I began to question some of the assumptions in my initial reading of the phrase. What exactly is the art of living? What does it mean to “master” it? What exactly is the nature of a “mistake”? How do I relate to my “mistakes”?

I found that some things I deemed mistakes turned out, over time, to be excellent decisions. And some initially excellent decisions turned out to be terrible ones. Some decisions have oscillated between the mistake-excellence polarity multiple times. Further, whenever I feel I’ve made a mistake, it’s always afforded valuable learning, so can I really call it a mistake in the negative sense if it’s something that contributed to my growth as a person?

Resting with these questions, I began to sense that a leap was necessary. Mistake seems, in its colloquial sense, to be caught within a duality. Its opposite is success. So long as I was regarding mistakes from within the dualistic framework of MISTAKE vs SUCCESS, which in essence is a binary WRONG vs RIGHT structure, then there was no understanding of them as anything other than “something gone wrong”.

But wrong for what? If I’m deciding what a mistake is, I’m necessarily defining success, and how do I know I’m defining success accurately? The phenomenal world is everchanging. By what criteria do I generate a selection of the transient forms we call “phenomena” to attach a label of “success” to?

So I came to the understanding that attaching a binary understanding of success vs failure works really well for clearly defined, objective phenomena (I can succeed or fail at opening a jar) but breaks down rapidly the more complex the context becomes. What context is more complex than life itself?

We can always simplify a life context, of course, to assign the binary and give ourselves a sense of grounding. Success can be X amount of dollars in a bank account; it can be a healthy romantic relationship; it can be a wealth of experience and stories to tell. It can be any part of the human experience we decide to cordon off and regard as an object of value. Mistakes would then be actions that take us away from those perceived success outcomes.

But why put our lives, and by extension ourselves, into a box?

I think because it gives us a sense of grounding. Somewhere, deep down, we all have an innate sense of the vast mystery of existence. Its unpredictability, its volatility. There’s beauty to this — it’s the essence of freedom, expressed through the incessant transience of the phenomenal world. Everything is free to arise, free to pass away.

From an early age, we begin to close down that sense of vast mystery; concomitantly, modern society is full of products, institutions, and social norms that reinforce the act of closing down. We’re told to consume material things we don’t necessarily need, and learn to judge ourselves and others by the materials we possess; we find ourselves entrenched within institutions that govern the entirety of our lives, beginning with school, then expanding out to the workplace, the banking system, the political systems of our countries and the economic systems of the world at large.

Life increases exponentially in complexity, yet somehow becomes less and less profound. Put another way, it becomes incredibly circumscribed, obsessively so — everything is bounded and defined and cataloged and put into its proper place upon the shelf of the world as just another thing, like every other thing. And things beget things beget things. We seem to be able to go on forever transcribing the world this way, pretending at profundity through the mass of knowledge we’ve accumulated, but always feeling there’s something missing in the way we’re grasping everything.

It’s as though the depth of mysterious complexity we sense at the root of things is turned sideways, extending instead into an infinite but shallow material complexity that just obfuscates ourselves and the world around us, and acts as a tangible barrier that we must penetrate if we want to probe the depths of existence.

I think mistakes pierce the barrier, providing an opening into that mysterious depth. It’s when things go wrong, begin to fall apart, that we have a limit experience and have have no choice but to engage with the world beyond our circumscribed understanding, which manifests in one way as the mistake/success duality.

So we pick up. We move on. We make do.

And somehow, a richness sprouts from that mysterious void. We find ourselves floating, not as we would like to be, but as we are. Life is understood to be far vaster than we think it is. We know what it is to hurt, what it is to lose, and we see it happening to those around us. We know how they hurt. Perhaps we’re moved to heal what we can in ourselves and the world around us. For what can’t be fully healed, there’s healing in simply understanding.

Freed from the neurotic need to avoid mistakes, life becomes a vast possibility space. Something is always around the corner, waiting to be discovered. When we act, we disclose reality.

Maybe what we disclose brings pain — but maybe it doesn’t. How we engage with the reality of that duality without being trapped within it, is perhaps the essence of the art of living.

Shoshaku jushaku.

Earlier I stated my initial understanding of the phrase:

How could a Zen master, someone who is supposed to have mastered the art of living, live a life in continual error? It seemed to be a contradiction.

– me 20 paragraphs/6 years ago

What a mistake I made in that understanding. I had an ideal of success: a Zen master who had mastered the art of life such that they never made mistakes. But that is a sterile idea, a fiction. A Zen master is nothing special. They just see the success/failure duality clearly for what it is, and act with sincerity of intention.

So yes, the life of a Zen master can be a continuous mistake. Why couldn’t it be?

One single-minded effort can lead anywhere, after all, but it will inevitably lead us home.