Cypress Trees in the Garden

Richard Bryan McDaniel’s Cypress Trees in the Garden: The Second Generation of Zen Teaching in America continues the history of North American Zen which he began in The Third Step East: Zen Masters of America (Sumeru Press, 2015). The earlier book described the pioneers who established Zen practice in North America; this new book focuses on the heirs and successors of those teachers and the challenges they faced.

Between March 2013 and September 2014, McDaniel traveled from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, from Montreal to Albuquerque, interviewing 75 prominent Zen teachers and their senior students. The result is a book which describes the way in which—like the Chinese and Japanese before them—North Americans have taken an Indian tradition which pre-dates Christianity and reformed it into something uniquely their own. Chapters on teachers in the Rinzai, Soto, and Sanbo Zen traditions provide a strikingly honest portrait of contemporary Zen teaching, practice, and social engagement in the United States and Canada.