Suzuki roshi biography

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    Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971)

    Remembering today one of the great Buddhist teachers, Suzuki Roshi,  Shunryu Suzuki, influential Soto Zen priest and founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (the first Soto Zen training monastery in the United States and one of the very first Buddhist training monasteries to be established outside of Asia)

    Suzuki was also the author of the hugely popular Zen Mind, Beginners Mind (1970). a key book from a key figure in the spreading in the West of the dharma.

    Here’s Allen – from an interview, circa.1996, with David Chadwick:

    DC: Can you remember the first time you met Suzuki – impressions?

    AG: The first time I met him was when I went over there [the San Francisco Zen Center, and, prior to that, Soko-ji, the Japanese community Zen temple, Suzuki’s first port of call on his arrival, in 1959, in the U.S] to sit. inom just sat. Maybe I heard something about what his attitude tow

  • suzuki roshi biography

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    Shunryu Suzuki roshi (1904-1971) was the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and one of the most beloved teachers in modern Buddhism. Known for his gentle and open approach based on Dōgen’s (Japanese, 1200-1253, see Study Topic 10) radical non-dual reading of Zen, Suzuki roshi emphasized simple daily zazen practice and ordinary everyday living.

    One of his watchwords was “beginner’s mind,” an open, humble, curious mind, always ready to be surprised and to learn something new. This, he taught, was the true zen spirit, the goal and the process of our practice. 

    Son of a Soto Zen priest, and himself ordained a Zen priest in his ungdom, Suzuki roshi trained in small Zen temples, and, briefly, at Eiheiji, the large Soto kloster. He was abbot of Rinso-In, a 500 year old Zen temple in Yaizu, a fishing town on the Japan Sea. Unusual among Japanese Zen priests, Suzuki roshi was always interested in the West. He studied English and nurtured from boyhood a dream of practicing in Ame

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    Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

    There are two Suzukis who stand large at the dawn of Zen breaking forth into North American culture.

    The first is Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, best known as D. T. Suzuki, a scholar, translator, and essayist, whose writings both directly and through the popularizations by his sometime disciple Alan Watts, first introduced many of the basic principles of Zen Buddhism to the American public.

    The other is Shunryu Suzuki, Soto Zen priest and missionary teacher who introduced Zen practices and established the first major Zen center in the West.

    Shunryu Suzuki was born on the 18th of May, 1904, in a village about fifty miles from Tokyo. His father was the abbot of Shoganji, the local Soto Zen temple. His mother was the daughter of a temple priest. He died on the 4th of December, 1971. He was sixty-seven years old.

    He began formal Zen study at the age of twelve with So-on Suzuki, a successor to and adoptive son of his father, at Zounin temple in Mori. At thirteen he