What Happened at Tassajara (Stories of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West, 1968-1971)

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.