Description
David Chadwick, author, activist, musician, and Zen priest, joins host Jon Joseph for remembrances about the early days of San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
Summary
David Chadwick, author, activist, musician, and Zen priest, joins host Jon Joseph on November 27th, 2025, for remembrances about the early days of San Francisco Zen Center and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
David began his study of Zen in 1966 under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi who ordained him as a priest in 1971, shortly before Suzuki’s death. Later, Chadwick continued to study with Zentatsu Baker Roshi and assisted in the operation of the San Francisco Zen Center for a number of years. Throughout this time, he helped SFZC develop its centers and businesses, including Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.
He is widely known as the primary archivist and biographer of Shunryu Suzuki, with his Crooked Cucumber (1999), Zen is Right Here (2007), and Zen is Right Now (2021). Now, Chadwick has begun to publish a three part series of anecdotes and recollections of the founding of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, called Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir, of the first Zen monastery in the United States.
In addition to writing books, David created maintains three websites, Cuke.com (“an archival site on the life and world of Shunryu Suzuki and those who knew him”); ZMBM (a site dedicated to his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind); and Shunryusuzuki.com (a comprehensive archive of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks, video, photos, and more). All these archives are free to the public. “I like to preserve things,” he notes.
“Tassajara Stories is a marvelous and entertaining book and David Chadwick is a tremendous storyteller. We have here a record of his lifelong passion to record the arrival of Zen in California. I opened the book to check it out, sat down at the kitchen table and there went my afternoon, reading and reading. The best thing, though, is that these stories touch on the core of practice, and the reason you might want to turn your heart toward the great matter. David encourages us to Zen practice in a subtle and amusing way. I’m giving it as a gift and reading it again myself.”
—John Tarrant, Director of The Pacific Zen Institute and author of Bring Me the Rhinoceros and Other Zen Koans That Will Save Your Life.
From the preface to Tassajara Stories:
“Shakkei is the outlying mountains and trees and whatever else one can see from a garden. If we look at what happened at Tassajara as being the garden of the book, then the other content is the shakkei. This borrowed scenery sets Tassajara and our experience in that valley in a broad context that gives background and color to who we were and how we got there, and includes the mountains, the woods, the road, our neighbors, the city, the times, the war, the counterculture, what was happening all around us.”
—David Chadwick
Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.