Suzuki Roshi at Tassajara, Online 2/6–2/27

The Zoom link to participate in this event will be provided at least 24 hours before it begins. Please call 415-354-0360 if you have any questions.

Four Saturdays, February 6–27, 8:30–10:00 am PT

When Tassajara was purchased at the end of 1966, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi began creating what would become the first Zen training monastery outside Asia. The idea had been forming for years: early issues of Wind Bell record members of SFZC searching for a monastery site as early as 1962. With Tassajara, that aspiration suddenly became a lived experiment.

What was Suzuki Roshi’s vision for this new monastery? How did he teach students who were entering a very different practice environment from the one they had known in San Francisco? And what emerged in his teaching when residential monastic practice, sesshin, work, ritual, and community life became the setting for Zen training?

In this series, Shundo David Haye will explore Suzuki Roshi’s early years at Tassajara through lecture transcripts, contemporaneous accounts, recordings, shuso logs, and more recent historical publications. Particular attention will be given to material from the first sesshins, Suzuki Roshi’s shosan encounters with students, and the near-daily lectures he offered during his final summer at Tassajara.

Together, these sources offer a distinctive view of Suzuki Roshi as a teacher responding to the demands of serious residential practice. They also illuminate the gradual development of forms and expectations that shaped Tassajara in the years that followed, including the transition from the experimental atmosphere of its earliest seasons toward the more formal training structures introduced under Tatsugami Roshi.

By returning to this formative period, the course will consider not only what happened at Tassajara, but how Tassajara itself changed Suzuki Roshi’s teaching and helped create the San Francisco Zen Center we know today.

Course Outline

Over four sessions, the course will move chronologically through Suzuki Roshi’s Tassajara years:

• Creating a Zen Monastery — the first and second sesshins
• Teaching the Dharma in a New Setting — Lotus Sutra and other talks from 1968–69
• Form and Freedom — Sandokai, Eko, and the practice culture of 197
• The Last Summer — Suzuki Roshi’s final season of teaching at Tassajara
   

Optional recommended reading

Books by David Chadwick:

• Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
• Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West—The First Year, 1967
• What Happened at Tassajara: Stories of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West, 1968–1971

Recordings:
All course sessions will be recorded, and registered participants will receive temporary access to the recordings for later viewing.