Ever-changing way

Mindfulness on the constant road to the unknown.

by George Tysh
5/17/00

A subtly shattering but hopeful work.

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki

by David Chadwick
Broadway Books
$26 hard, $15 paper, 432 pp.

The teaching must not be stock words or stale stories but must be always kept fresh. That is real teaching.

Thus do the words of its subject open the biography of Shunryu Suzuki, Soto Zen master and Japanese citizen, who in 1959 made the United States his home and brought with him an approach to meditation that would stimulate the growth of Zen practice in the West.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a selection of Suzuki’s dharma talks (published in 1970, the year before his death), dropped a stone into the clear pool of our unconsciousness – and its ripples are still being felt. That slender book has been one of the most popular (because it is so generous and accessible) Zen texts in English for the past three decades.

Suzuki’s life story, with its hard suffering, gentle joys and humble triumphs, is narrated by David Chadwick, a former student of the roshi (teacher), with loving, unblinking simplicity and an awareness of the painful contradictions of existence. Drawing upon more than 150 interviews with Suzuki’s family, friends and disciples, Chadwick digs into the past to accumulate a mass of revelatory anecdotes and details, telling the story of an uncommon life with humor and sharp observation.

Born in 1904, Suzuki started his spiritual training at the age of 11. By the time he was 25, he was the abbot of a small temple in the Japanese countryside, looking forward to immersing himself in Buddhist studies and a life of assistance to his community.

But in 1940, he watched helplessly as Japan was taken over by nationalist military hysteria. As a devout Buddhist, Suzuki took the precepts of compassion and pacifism to be absolutes. The war, seen through his eyes, was a long series of karmic catastrophes culminating in the unthinkable at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent humiliation of surrender. One of the quiet revelations of Chadwick’s book is the vision we get of wartime Japan from the standpoint of a highly marginalized insider.

But the turning point for Suzuki, the decision that was to affect so many lives besides his own, was his move to the United States and subsequent devotion to developing an American dharma practice at the San Francisco Zen Center. In the fascinating chronology of Suzuki’s last 12 years, we watch as Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Aitken, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and countless others go in and out the zendo door. Those who would remain – Richard Baker, Marian Derby, Trudy Dixon, Grahame Petchey, Philip Wilson et al. – would participate in the cultivation of a fresh offshoot of Soto Zen.

Chadwick as biographer is remarkably nonjudgmental, though he doesn’t gloss over the difficulties, outbursts or tragedies. Zen has no use for the concepts of sin or guilt and Chadwick understands Suzuki’s (or his students’) foibles as rest stops on the road to more perfect realization. The result is a subtly shattering but hopeful work.

Each chapter and subsection of Crooked Cucumber begins with a quotation from the roshi, so that Suzuki’s ideas literally permeate his timeline and now extend beyond it to each reader. This makes life situations seem instructional, like illustrations of thought, much as the Zen koans collected in such Chinese classics as The Blue Cliff Record and The Gateless Gate are followed by poetic commentary and elucidation.

One of the more agreeable contradictions of the Zen tradition is that, although teachers and serious students alike tend to discount the importance of books and rational mind on the road to enlightenment, there certainly are a load of Zen texts out there, both ancient and contemporary. This one, the first full biography of a Zen master in English, just needs to be read.

A garden is never finished. – Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

George Tysh is the Metro Times arts editor.