What Happened at Tassajara
Description
From the award-winning and best-selling author of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki, comes the concluding volume of exploration, through personal memoir, oral history, and rare photographs, of the physical and spiritual place known as Tassajara—a monastery founded by the San Francisco Zen Center in 1967.
Peopled like a Sixties film of Buddhism invasion, with hippies, dreamers, lovers, and the first serious practitioners in the US. Joan Baez, David Steindl-Rast, Maud Oakes, Jack Kerouac, Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love, Chogyam Trungpa, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, Emma Bragdon, Jacob Needleman, are all here. The book concludes with Shunryu Suzuki dying from cancer before the end of 1971, and how his passing was felt in the community.
Anecdotes also include an impromptu band calling themselves the Non Burnables, that included Chadwick himself on guitar, and Suzuki sitting on the band platform playing a kazoo and wearing a cowboy hat. This volume also tells the story of the writing and publication of Suzuki’s international bestseller, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
This is the continued story of what happened at the founding of the first Zen monastery in the West.
More details
Person
David Chadwick died in early 2026, just after finishing this book in manuscript. At the age of 21, in 1966, he first rang the bell of Sokoji, a Soto Zen temple and the original home of the San Francisco Zen Center. Thus began his serious study under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Ordained a Zen priest in 1971, he later wrote Suzuki’s biography, Crooked Cucumber, as well as Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, and Tassajara Stories, the first book in this series. Chadwick was the primary preserver of the legacy of Shunryu Suzuki and those whose paths crossed his. See cuke.com and shunryusuzuki.com for more information.