By Tova Green
Prolific author and archivist David Chadwick may be best known for his biography of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki. David’s newest book, Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West—The First Year, 1967 will be released by Monkfish on September 23, 2025.
David, who has been living in Bali for several years, calls this book a memoir and oral history. It is based on stories people have told him about the period leading up to SFZC’s purchase of Tassajara, on its first year as a Zen monastery, and on David’s memories of the time. Stylistically, it is similar to his earlier books, Crooked Cucumber and Thank You and OK! An American Failure in Japan, in that it is a series of vignettes woven into a larger narrative.
“Everything [in the book] is what people have told me or stuff that I saw, as well as material I found in Windbell (San Francisco Zen Center’s Journal from 1961 to 2001). The book shows a lot about the background of how Tassajara evolved. I also included plenty about Richard Baker’s relationship with Shunryu Suzuki and with other students.”
David was curious about what brought people to Tassajara and wanted to retrace his own path there, drawing from a wide variety of sources. He expresses being intrigued by the Japanese word Shakkei, which means “the scenery surrounding a garden.” David wrote in his 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.”
Tassajara Stories will be the first in a series. The next volume will span the years 1968–1971, ending with the cremation of Suzuki Roshi, who died on December 4th, 1971. A third volume will cover the years 1972 through most of 1975, the last year David lived there. “I wrote all three books concurrently, not thinking of them as being separate books. Initially, I had it all together as one book. It was seven hundred pages—too long for a single volume!” David has already sent the second volume to the publisher. He is now working on the audiobook version of Volume Two.
David began working on Tassajara Stories about eleven years ago. “One day I told my wife Katrinka an anecdote set at Tassajara that I’d just remembered. She asked if I’d written it down. The next day I did write it down and read it to her when she came home. The day after that, I wrote down another one and read it to her. That continued daily for some time. Initially, I wasn’t planning on writing a book.”
In addition to writing books, David created and, with significant assistance, 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 Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind); and Shunryusuzuki.com (a comprehensive archive of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks, video, photos, and more). It is important to David that these materials be publicly accessible and free. All the material, except that which is linked to on other sites, can be downloaded and shared. David says he is aware of many times in history when libraries and archives were burned or destroyed.
“I like to preserve things,” he notes.