Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was a Japanese priest of the Soto school of Zen. According to San Francisco Zen Center, he came to San Francisco in 1959 and was struck by the seriousness and the “beginner’s mind” of the Americans who wanted to practise Zen. He decided to stay. As more people sat with him, Zen Center came into being. It was established in 1962 by Suzuki Roshi and his American students, and he was its first abbot.

Under his guidance the community grew beyond the city. In 1967 he founded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the Ventana Wilderness, which Zen Center describes as the first Soto Zen training monastery on the West coast. Today the organisation runs three practice places: Beginner’s Mind Temple in San Francisco, Green Gulch Farm in Marin County and Tassajara. Zen Center says its teachers follow Suzuki Roshi’s style of “warm hand and heart to warm hand and heart”.

Zen Center quotes him on the point of practice: to see and observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a book of his edited informal talks, appeared in 1970; Zen Center calls it a modern spiritual classic. More talks were collected after his death, including Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness, his lectures on the Sandokai, and Not Always So.

He died in 1971. Zentatsu Richard Baker became the second abbot. Dainin Katagiri, who had assisted Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco, later became the first abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. Suzuki Roshi’s students and their students now lead Zen groups around the United States.

Suzuki Roshi’s Soto lineage is also the lineage of Eihei Dōgen, the thirteenth-century founder of the school in Japan. This is a link of lineage, not of teacher and student.

The cuke.com archive, begun by David Chadwick, works to preserve his legacy.