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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.
“Radiant in memory and moment, free of cliche and lit by laughter and care: here is a living history of monastic Zen practice reborn in the West. Nobody tells it better than David Chadwick, firsthand and fluent in the everyday mind of a community woven of work, word and breath in wondrous form and emptiness.” —Steven Tipton, author of In and Out of Church: The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America
“Even more fascinating than the first book. I love the Stories!” —Neil Rubenking, Principal writer, PC Mag
“David Chadwick’s writing rhythms meet exactly what he has to say. These Tassajara stories illuminate the early years of Tassajara as a Zen monastery. His precision and specific detail are not only of the people and place but of an era. The weaving in of American cultural evolution is exciting informative, and true. Only this author, I think, could have reported such a full story.” —Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing on Empty
“Collecting memories of those who were there, David Chadwick brings us to Tassajara Zen Mountain Center deep in California. His voice is concrete, vivid, and imaginative with acute observations. Centering around Shunryū Suzuki Roshi, a quiet, humble, ordinary-looking, authentic, and determined leader, so many different personalities came together and created a magical meditation center, open to guests in summer with mountains, a pristine creek, a hot spring, and gourmet vegetarian food. Fascinating episodes well-narrated.” —Kazuaki Tanahashi, Japanese calligrapher, Zen teacher; author of Moon in a Dewdrop
“A Buddhist priest recalls his time at America’s first Zen monastery. In 1967, Shunryū Suzuki founded Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California, the first Zen monastery in the Western world. Chadwick, ordained a priest shortly before Suzuki’s death in 1971, was present at the monastery’s inception, and in this book he chronicles his years there, beginning in early 1968 and ending, three years later, with its founder’s funeral. The unconventional living arrangements—children, couples, and people of both sexes were welcome during the guest season—resulted in considerable sexual tension and drama, leading to some of the book’s most memorable anecdotes: Suzuki had to intervene to end mixed nude bathing; the author fled his room one night after a naked stranger attempted to enter his sleeping bag; an earnest young man named Barry lured a woman off campus and sexually assaulted her (Chadwick learned that he had done the same to another woman the year before). The group came under fire from those who considered it a cult; a man named E.L., who wore robes and behaved so strangely that he was given tranquilizers, was asked to leave after he made others uncomfortable. In this volume (his second book about Tassajara), Chadwick pulls off a feat rare in the crowded field of memoirs: He makes now-distant events centering on largely unknown people compelling for general readers. A gifted storyteller, the author incorporates potentially esoteric concepts (zazen, the study of the eko, the philosophical musings of Alan Watts) into the narrative in a manner that never feels alienating; this is ultimately a book about people and how they operate in community. To his credit, Chadwick refuses to render Suzuki hagiographically—rather, he takes a warts-and-all approach, painting him as prickly, inscrutable, and occasionally insensitive. This approach makes the man all the more fascinating (speaking about the moon landing, Suzuki stated, ‘I’m not interested in anyone who’s interested in going to the moon’). An honest and engrossing account of communal life.” —Kirkus Reviews
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.