CROOKED CUCUMBER: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki
By David Chadwick
Los Angeles Times, February 20, 1999
The son of a traditional Zen Buddhist priest in rural Japan, Shunryu Suzuki was born in 1904. Destined to become one of the great intermediaries in the westward flow of cultural and religious values from the Far East in the latter part of this century, he played a quite different role from the D.T. Suzuki with whom he is sometimes confused, who taught at Harvard and Colombia and published numerous books on Zen at roughly the same time. "He's the big Suzuki," said Shunryu with characteristic self-deprecation: "I'm the little Suzuki."
"Crooked Cucumber" was the nickname he earned as a novice monk: he was the odd one in the barrel, quirky and severely absent-minded. Determined to follow in his father's footsteps, he took on himself at age eleven age a strict regimen of long zazen sitting-with appropriate applications of the kyosaku, the stick whacked across the shoulders to rouse the sleepy or adjust the slacker's posture-and rigorous daily chores. In this thoroughly researched biography David Chadwick, himself a Zen priest ordained by Suzuki in 1970, follows his mentor's early progress from child to university student to priest and abbot, and through his quiet pacifism in the years of World War II.
In 1959 Suzuki finally achieved a long-held dream, coming to America to "teach Buddhism, for world peace." He arrived in San Francisco at a propitious moment, when the poets and artists of the Beat generation were howling-to coin a phrase-in search of an alternative to the endemic middle-class materialism of the post-war years. Attracted by Suzuki's instruction in the simple, demanding discipline of daily sitting and by the non-dogmatic spiritual values of Zen Buddhist practice, they gravitated to his Zen Center; and from quiet monk. Suzuki transformed himself into an inspiring and influential teacher, whose power resided more in the gentle but always rigorous example of his personal practice of silent meditation, ministry, and daily ritual than in verbal message.
His influence continued to spread until his death in 1971. The San Francisco temple thrived and expanded, and in 1967, Suzuki and his associates founded the Zen Mountain Center at Tassajara as a yearlong retreat for students and disciples and a summer hospitality center for the lay visitors who still come there from throughout the world seeking peace and serenity. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the book edited from Suzuki's teachings some thirty years ago, is still a popular seller.
Chadwick's biography is a loving tribute. The Suzuki he portrays was at once stern and playful, unassuming, yet sometimes also imperious and short-tempered. At the end of his life he judged himself to have been a "bad father and bad husband," but hoped to have been a good priest. What the book lacks is the art of the storyteller: the feel for the essential, for light and shade, for pace and timing. While the interspersing of often fascinating first-hand material from Suzuki's teaching works well, the rather choppy episodic structure impedes the story's flow. Fully the first third of the book risks losing the reader in family history and in the politics of Japanese temple priesthood before Suzuki finds his mission. Later, in San Francisco, we encounter a parade of associates and disciples about whom we learn not very much aside from names. I am left wanting to know more, for example, about Suzuki's contact with such problematic luminaries as Alan Watts and Trungpa Rinpoche, and with poets like Alan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder; and about the unresolved internecine struggles of board members, about which Chadwick remains notably coy. Still, this book affords a wonderful opportunity to meet Suzuki, the man, and to know that integrity, passionate commitment, and dedication to mission can make as great a contribution even in this contemporary world as flash and rhetoric.
