Shunryu Suzuki (
1905-
1971) was a
Japanese
Zen master (
Soto school), direct spiritual descendent of the Zen master
Dogen. He moved to
San Francisco,
USA in
1959,
and founded the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen training monastery
outside Asia, City Center (in San Francisco) and Green Gulch Farm. A collection of his
teisho[?]'s (Zen talks) were bundled in
the books
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and
Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen. His lectures on the
Sandokai[?] are collected in
Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness. Suzuki's biography is captured in David Chadwick's
Crooked Cucumber[?].