Crooked Cucumber
The Life and Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
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- $199.00
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
Shunryu Suzuki is known to countless readers as the author of the modern spiritual classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. This most influential teacher comes vividly to life in Crooked Cucumber, the first full biography of any Zen master to be published in the West. To make up his intimate and engrossing narrative, David Chadwick draws on Suzuki's own words and the memories of his students, friends, and family. Interspersed with previously unpublished passages from Suzuki's talks, Crooked Cucumber evokes a down-to-earth life of the spirit. Along with Suzuki we can find a way to "practice with mountains, trees, and stones and to find ourselves in this big world."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From 1959 until his death in 1971, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki taught the principles and practice of Zen Buddhism to receptive audiences in San Francisco. In 1961, Suzuki founded the San Francisco Zen Center, where he taught hundreds of students hungry for the master's words on Zen. Chadwick, who studied with Suzuki from 1966 to 1971, collects stories from the master, or roshi's, many students about Suzuki's life and work and weaves them into a lively biography. Chadwick follows Suzuki's life from childhood in Japan to the tumultuous '60s in San Francisco. Drawing upon archival material in Japan and America, he peppers his account of Suzuki's life with generous quotes from the roshi's lectures, many of which are published here for the first time. When Chadwick asked Suzuki's widow for permission to write this book, she exhorted him to "tell many funny stories" about her husband. For example, when Suzuki became a monk at the age of 13, his master called him "Crooked Cucumber" because he seemed too scatterbrained and dull witted to be a Zen priest. Suzuki's master once remarked that he thought Suzuki would have very few disciples, and, as Chadwick notes, it was only when he came to America that Suzuki began to attract a large following. Another "funny story" Chadwick tells is that when people would confuse Shunryu Suzuki with the Harvard professor D.T. Suzuki, the roshi would say simply, "No, he's the big Suzuki, I'm the little Suzuki." Chadwick's biography provides a generous glimpse of the humanity and message of one of the great spiritual teachers of the modern world.
