Shunryū Suzuki

Shunryū Suzuki was born in 1904 in a small village near Hiratsuka, southwest of Tokyo, the son of a Sōtō Zen priest. He was ordained at twelve, completed monastic training in his teens and twenties, and through the difficult years of the Japanese militarist period and the war served as a temple priest at Rinso-in in Yaizu, where he protected several individuals (including Korean conscripted laborers) and quietly resisted the militarization of Japanese Buddhist institutions. After the war he continued at Rinso-in until 1959, when at fifty-five he accepted an assignment to Sōkō-ji — the Japanese-American Sōtō temple in [[mission-district-sf|San Francisco]] — primarily to serve the Japanese-American [[sangha|Buddhist community]] in the Bay Area.

He arrived in May 1959. The job was meant to be temporary; he stayed twelve years. What changed his trajectory was the steady arrival, week by week, of young non-Japanese Americans — students, hippies, intellectuals, drifters — who came to the early-morning zazen periods he kept at Sōkō-ji and who began asking him to teach.

The institution-building

Suzuki was disciplined about zazen — the practice came first, before doctrine, before institutional structure, before personality. The young Americans found this corrective; many had come from psychedelic culture or counterculture experimentation and found in his quiet insistence on the formal practice something the surrounding culture was not offering. By 1962 the group of regular American students was substantial enough to incorporate as [[san-francisco-zen-center|San Francisco Zen Center]], with Suzuki as abbot and a small board of his students.

In 1967 the group purchased Tassajara Hot Springs in the Ventana Wilderness south of Carmel — a remote former resort with hot mineral springs, accessible only by a steep dirt road — and converted it into a Zen training monastery, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. It was the first Zen monastery established outside Asia. Sōtō traditional monastic training was adapted to American conditions and conducted there each year in the long practice periods of fall and spring.

A third institution, Green Gulch Farm, an organic farm and meditation center north of [[mission-district-sf|San Francisco]] at Muir Beach, was added in 1972 (after Suzuki’s death) and continues today.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Suzuki’s English was not fluent. He gave talks (teisho) in stretches of broken-but-effective English; the talks were recorded, transcribed, and edited by his student Trudy Dixon during the year before her death from cancer in 1969. Dixon’s editing turned the transcribed talks into the polished short paragraphs of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind — a book of remarkable clarity and warmth that has been continuously in print since 1970 and is, by most accounts, the most widely read Zen book in English.

Its central paragraph, often quoted: In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few. [[daoism|The way]] to control your cow is to give it a large, spacious meadow.

The institutional reckoning

A note for honesty. After Suzuki’s death in 1971, his Dharma successor Richard Baker led [[san-francisco-zen-center|San Francisco Zen Center]] through a period of remarkable expansion (the addition of [[greens-restaurant|Greens Restaurant]], Page Street’s residential community, the publication arm) and into a major crisis in 1983 when ethical and financial improprieties became publicly known. Baker resigned; the community went through years of careful reorganization; the institutional culture has been substantially reformed. The contemporary leadership — including teachers in lineages descending from Suzuki through Baker and through other transmitted students — has worked extensively on the questions of teacher authority, institutional accountability, and the conditions under which the practice can be safely conducted. The crisis and the reform are part of the institutional history; the platform’s posture is to take both the founding work and the subsequent reckoning seriously.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[zen]]
• Parallels: [[dt-suzuki]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Shunryū Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Weatherhill, 1970. Source class: book / primary.
2. Shunryū Suzuki. Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai. University of [[berkeley|California]] Press, 1999. Source class: book / posthumous teachings.
3. Shunryū Suzuki. Not Always So. HarperOne, 2002. Source class: book / posthumous teachings.
4. David Chadwick. Crooked [[cucumber|Cucumber]]: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki. Broadway, 1999. Source class: book / authorized biography.
5. Michael Downing. Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at [[san-francisco-zen-center|San Francisco Zen Center]]. Counterpoint, 2001. Source class: book / institutional history including the Baker crisis.

Lenses still to grow

• Tassajara as a place and continuing institution.
• The Baker crisis in detail — a piece of American Buddhist history that the broader Western Buddhist world has had to work through carefully.
• Trudy Dixon as the editor whose work made Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind the book it is.
• Suzuki’s wartime quiet resistance at Rinso-in.
• Sōtō Zen practice in America as a continuing tradition descending from him.