Quote
Lois Shepheard
He told us how, as a young man, he’d gone up into the mountains and learned how to be a healer. I watched him heal people on several occasions. It appeared to sap a lot of his energy. I’ve seen children who’d fallen and hurt an arm go happily back into a class after a few minutes of his ministrations. ‘Now you go play,’ he’d say. I saw an American boy with a fairly severe leg injury of several months’ duration, limp toward Dr Suzuki and 30 minutes later, walk away easily. Some Zen training is described as channelling the healing vibrations available in nature.

Suzuki told us he’d learned to withstand cold and heat and that, as part of his training, he’d grasped white hot metal. He never wore a coat, even in the depths of Matsumoto winter. ... Certainly, those who study Zen can develop, among other attributes, indifference to the discomforts of heat and cold.

As he listened to Monday concert items (or indeed to some performances in his teaching studio), Suzuki often appeared to fall asleep but was immediately alert when the kenkyusei stopped playing. I asked him once how he kept going through his long hours of teaching. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘When a student plays, I decide in the first two minutes what I’m going to teach and then I sleep till he finishes.’

In Matsumoto, in the middle of his teaching, our master would leave his studio and we’d all wait till he returned from watching a sumo contest on TV. He loved watching those huge men wrestling. I was amused at that. They were such a contrast to his small frame.

It was an expensive lesson; one paid for a month’s tuition whether there for a month or just a day.

Dr and Mrs Suzuki visited my students at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (RVIB) School. Dr Suzuki happily posed with a nearly blind, partially deaf child with severe learning difficulties but he complained about her bow-hold after she played.

Waltraud (Suzuki's wife) lived all her married life in a cigarette smoke filled home (the 50-60 Camel cigarettes per day). ‘Ach, that man,’ she said. ‘He kills me with his cigarettes.’ Mrs Suzuki eventually died of emphysema in 2000. Dr Suzuki told us that when he was young he saw a picture of the world’s oldest man. It was a Russian with a cigarette in his hand, so Suzuki determined that to attain a long life he too must smoke. It must have worked; he passed away in his 100th year.