From a Buddhism Class to Tassajara: Suzuki's American Zen

Shunryu Suzuki did not arrive in San Francisco in 1959 to found an American Zen movement. He arrived to serve a Japanese immigrant congregation as an ordinary temple priest, and it was only after being asked, almost incidentally, to teach a class on Buddhism that the audience shifted: interested Americans with no family connection to the temple began showing up in growing numbers, and Suzuki responded by teaching zazen as a practice open to anyone rather than as a devotional service belonging to one community. That shift, from temple priest to teacher of a new and largely non-Japanese student body, is the hinge his whole subsequent career turns on. San Francisco Zen Center, formed in 1962 by Suzuki and these same students, gave that teaching a permanent institutional home, and the 1966 purchase of Tassajara Hot Springs, which Suzuki directed his student Richard Baker to complete, took it further still: a residential monastery, the first of its kind outside Asia, where practice could be sustained at a depth a weekly class could never reach. His own manner of teaching, informal talks rather than systematic doctrine, later gave the movement its most durable public document almost by accident, when students edited a collection of those talks into Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, published in 1970, the year before his death, and read since by far more people than ever sat in his own zendo.