San Francisco Zen Center

Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker

In 2013, a small inheritance allowed me to undertake a pilgrimage to some of the major Zen Centers throughout North America. I had written a book – The Third Step East – about the pioneer figures who brought Zen to this continent, and although they were now all dead, their immediate successors were still living and I would be able to visit them. The result was my fourth book, Cypress Trees in the Garden.

I began my tour in San Francisco on March 21, 2013 and gradually worked my way east across the continent to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The process – which is still on-going – has been a substantial learning experience for me. When I set out, I had little idea of how to conduct an interview; I’ve been told I’ve become good at it, but it wasn’t a skill that came naturally. More significantly, back then I had a naïve concept about the nature of Zen in America. I had thought that the centers I arranged to visit might vary in size but would otherwise be similar to the Montreal Zen Center where I was practicing. As soon as I stepped through the door at the San Francisco Zen Center’s primary site on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets – called City Center – I realized how wrong that assumption was. Elsewhere I have described the difference to be similar to that between a Quaker Meeting House and the Vatican. It’s an exaggerated analogy, but it accurately describes how it felt at the time.

SFZC is huge. City Center is one of three main practice centers along with their mountain retreat at Tassajara and an organic farm, Green Gulch. At one time, they owned many of the residential buildings in the neighborhood. It has become smaller, but it remains the largest and wealthiest Zen community in America.

I had arranged to meet the then current Central Abbot of Zen Center – Steve Stücky – and two of his predecessors, Blanche Hartman (co-abbot from 1996 to 2002) and Mel Weitsman (co-abbot from 1988 to 1997). I arrived early and was told that the abbots and other community members were in the Buddha Hall for the noon chanting service. There were no noon chanting services in Montreal. I wasn’t aware that there are any chanting services held outside sesshin in Montreal.

I was shown a place to wait in the foyer where I could peak into the Buddha Hall and see people doing full body prostrations. There were banners and paintings on the walls depicting Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of SFZC. There are no portraits of his immediate successor, Richard Baker (abbot from 1971 to 1983). Baker and SFZC had parted ways in 1983, and, at the time of my visit thirty years later, the relationship was still strained.

In Cypress Trees in the Garden, I compare Baker’s role at SFZC to that of Saint Paul within Christianity. Shunryu Suzuki was the founder, but it is clear that on his own, SFZC would have remained a much more modest operation. When Baker first came to Zen Center, it had an annual budget of less than $5500, and they had $2,304.24 in the bank. Under his leadership, that grew to more than $4 million. Zen Center real estate holdings were valued at $20 million.

Shunryu Suzuki is a fascinating figure still beloved by those who knew him, and yet his own children, when they came from Japan to visit him, were confounded by the number of loyal students he had amassed in America. They respected their father but had thought of him as little more than a small-town priest of no particular stature. They were surprised to discover that he led two thriving monastic communities in America with numerous students who obviously revered him. Likewise when Suzuki’s American students travelled to Japan they were surprised to find that their beloved teacher was quite an insignificant figure in Japanese Soto circles. Suzuki had been a relatively ordinary figure in Japan, but Zen training can mold individuals of impressive character, which contributed to him becoming an extraordinary figure in America.

Before coming to American in 1959, he had been the resident priest of a rural Soto temple where his duties included conducting funerals and memorial services, carrying out ritual activities, and chanting sutras on behalf of the community. Within the Soto structure, he was an abbot, and students were occasionally sent to him for training. Few, however, had any serious interest in the Buddhadharma; they were simply preparing to take responsibility for family-run temples, as Suzuki himself had done. He came to feel that the Zen tradition had grown stale and was in need of revitalization.

“It’s very clear,” David Chadwick tell me. “He was not a big deal at all in Japan. What made him a big deal here? In America? You know what Taizan Maezumi said? He said, ‘We don’t know why Suzuki Roshi was so successful, but all we know is he was.’”

David is the author of Crooked Cucumber, the standard Suzuki biography. He is also an archivist who maintains the massive cuke.com and shunryusuzuki.com online.

“Maezumi was here in Los Angeles four years before Suzuki came to San Francisco, and he said, ‘I’d been trying to get a Zen group going.’ Other people have been trying to get something going, but there was no real practicing group. Maezumi said it didn’t happen until Suzuki came and all of a sudden it happened around him. We can’t say why. But then it started happening elsewhere. And he said Suzuki Roshi made all this possible. I like his point of view.”

There were a handful of centers operating when Suzuki incorporated SFZC in 1962. In New York there was the First Zen Institute of America in New York established by Alan Watts’ mother-in-law. It offered meditation programs, but its primary focus was translating primary sources into English. And in Hawaii, Robert Aitken and his wife, Anne Hopkins, had established the Diamond Sangha. But while practice centers were scarce, interest in Zen as a concept was high as the result of books by authors like Watts and D. T. Suzuki. (Suzuki is a common Japanese name and Shunryu Suzuki at times called himself the “small Suzuki” in contrast to the “big Suzuki,” the scholar, D. T. Suzuki, who can be credited with first introducing Zen theory to the West.)

There were, however, mission temples. Soto authorities in Japan had established temples in Los Angeles (Zenshuji, 1922) and San Francisco (Sokoji, 1934) for the benefit of Japanese families in California. The priests at these temples came from Japan, and when – at the age of 55 – Shunryu Suzuki had the opportunity to be posted at Sokoji, he accepted it with alacrity. The temples were largely cultural centers, places where Japanese traditions and values were retained and respected. They were not meditation studios. Meditation – as far as the congregations at both Zenshuji and Sokoji were concerned in the 1950s – was something monks, not lay people, did.  

As far as the congregation at Sokoji were concerned, the new priest’s duties would have been much the same as in Japan. However, as David tells me, “Suzuki Roshi landed in the middle of the Alan Watts Zen boom. Another priest at Sokoji took him to a class at Watts’ American Academy of Asian Studies. He meets people there and picks up his first three non-Japanese students there, like the first week.”

The non-Japanese students had read Watts and Jack Kerouac. They came searching for Zen with a capital Z. They wanted meditation and often had romantic ideas about awakening to their True Natures. Awakening wasn’t something Suzuki spoke about, but he came to have so many non-Japanese practitioners that the congregation compelled him to find an alternate location for them. The new building was the former Jewish girls’ residence I visited on the corner of Page and Laguna Streets.

I ask David what Suzuki Roshi was like.

“I’ve interviewed a lot of people,” he tells me, “and I’ve heard what a lot of people have to say. Not everybody was turned on to him as a teacher, but the most common thing to hear people say is, ‘I never met anybody before that really understood me.’ Or they’d say, ‘I never met anybody who was so unjudgmental and so open and so ordinary at the same time and so humble.’ Something happened to him when he came to America. He loved the hippie thing; he loved the Beat thing. He didn’t participate. He didn’t want people getting high when they came, but he saw that people who had experimented with psychedelics had opened up their way-seeking mind to a great extent. And so he appreciated it.”

Richard Baker was one of the young people who came to sit with Suzuki at Sokoji in the early ’60s, and he developed a deep and loyal affection for his teacher. By 1966, Baker had ordained and was on his way to becoming Suzuki’s right-hand-man.

David Chadwick was with Suzuki at Sokoji, before the move to City Center occurred. “I had some time there in its smaller form, then we were gearing up to buy land in the woods down south to build a monastery. And so I got involved in that. And then we heard there’s this place near the land we’re trying to buy called Tassajara Springs, and it’s really cool. So when we go there, it’s actually contiguous with Tassajara Springs, the same land. And we can walk there in about an hour. So that was great. And then at the last minute I hear, oh, we’re buying Tassajara instead of the horse pasture. And that doubles the money. We were raising $25,000 as a down payment on $150,000 then all of a sudden we’re raising $300,000. That didn’t mean much to me, but Zen Center’s whole annual budget, I’ve heard different figures, $8,000 a year, $12,000 is the highest I heard. So everybody got in the action, but Dick Baker’s genius came out and his energy.”

Baker proved to be a gifted organizer and a more than effective fund-raiser. He orchestrated a capital campaign which engaged people like Alan Watts, the beat poet, Allen Gingberg, and the Grateful Dead. “But what really did it,” David says, “was Dick and Suzuki going to the East Coast and meeting very wealthy donors. Chester Carlson who invented Xerox, a great philanthropist, wonderful man.” Carlson had brought Philip Kapleau to Rochester and funded his center there. “There was also Edward Johnson, not really the founder of Fidelity, but what he took over as Fidelity was not at all what Fidelity became. He made it what it became. So we had the CEO of the biggest mutual fund company in the world helping.”

The money was raised, and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center became the first Buddhist monastery to be established outside of Asia. Although, as David points out, it was unlike any other monastery elsewhere.

“I learned a lot watching Dick Baker relate with Suzuki Roshi. Dick was just relating to him like another person. They were talking about what would work, what would not work, how to run the place and everyday things. And I’d see them disagree on things. Like about women. I didn’t hear this, but Dick told me. There’d never been a monastery with men and women together. But Dick just said, ‘No women, no Tassajara.’ You know? He gave Suzuki Roshi an ultimatum. And families. Dick was responsible for humanizing Tassajara a great deal because Suzuki didn’t know some things. A couple of women who were pregnant very early on had very hard experiences because they thought they should keep practicing and their husbands thought they should practice. A lot of these rigid ideas that Suzuki didn’t want people to have.”

By the end of the 1960s, both Tassajara and City Center were filled to capacity primarily with young people committing themselves to Zen practice. Suzuki had established something monumental, but, in order to ensure it would continue, he needed to identify a successor, needed to give “transmission” to a worthy heir. There is evidence that he had intended to give transmission to several students, all of whom might then have had equal authority. But in the end, only one student – Richard Baker – received transmission.

Part of the difficulty that followed may have been because Suzuki’s students understood transmission differently than he may have. The students had no doubt that their teacher was a fully enlightened and officially transmitted Zen Master although Suzuki had not claimed to be either. For Suzuki – as was common in the Soto tradition – transmission was more a matter of authorizing another to teach. Often it was conferred as a matter of course to ensure that a son inherited his father’s temple; Suzuki, for example, conferred transmission on the son of a friend during a visit to Japan even though the young man had not studied with him. Suzuki’s students, on the other hand, saw transmission as an acknowledgement of achievement, a recognition that the recipient was also now a fully enlightened teacher. When Suzuki’s chosen heir later exhibited what others considered unenlightened behavior, it became problematic.

The reason no other student received transmission was that Suzuki was dying. In March of 1971, he had an operation to remove his gall bladder which a routine biopsy revealed was cancerous.

Suzuki turned Zen Center over to Baker, and, the following November, Baker was installed as the second abbot of the institution. He was 35 years old. Suzuki died just two weeks later, on December 4^th.

“Why did people turn against Baker?” I ask David.

“Well, not everybody did, but a lot of people did. He just got too high. And I’d say too much of a sense of entitlement, and he didn’t have enough peer . . .  I don’t want to say pressure, but you know.”

“Presence?”

“Peer presence, right? He was like on top of an ivory tower, and that’s very, very hard to live with. And he was very young to be in that role. But you know, Suzuki took over his temple at around 30, 32 or something – 32 maybe – and people were saying he was too young. But he was Japanese. They’re just totally duty bound. They don’t get distracted by everything else. Anyway, Dick did a great job in many, many ways. And a lot of people really appreciate what he did. I’m very close with him now. He’s 87. He’s still teaching and giving talks, and we have a nice relationship. His group in Germany, I’m more comfortable there than with any Zen group. It’s great, and he has really good students. Germans, they’re not as neurotic as Americans. They don’t become true believers and fall in line and all that, at least the ones I’ve known. And also, he’s learned, he’s gotten older, and he learned some from his mistakes, but he still has a lot of the basic characteristics that create enemies, and he’s had detractors in Germany, but not on the scale he had in America. In America, everything went up too high.”

I ask about those characteristics that create enemies.

“I call the period of Richard Baker as abbot the imperial period of Zen Center. But let me tell you, I was talking to somebody earlier today. And Blanche Hartman wasn’t allowed to die in City Center because her care was getting too complicated, and they didn’t feel comfortable, and she had wanted to. And the woman I was talking to, who goes way back to Dick’s time, said, ‘That wouldn’t have happened under Richard Baker.’ He was very good about a lot of things. But it’s really dangerous for somebody to become a teacher and not have enough feedback and get higher and higher above other people and have a higher standard of living and have all these perks they don’t have. I think what Baker did overall has had a lot of good effect, a lot of good teachers came out of it. That’s the nature of transmitting practice and wisdom and everything. It’s done by imperfect people doing it imperfectly, and it’s messy. Anyway, he brought it on himself, but that helped Zen Center evolve into its next stage. I don’t know if it’ll survive without an imperial person in charge because he knows how to make things survive. And he’s held that German group together incredibly well. But we’ll see. I mean, it might all dissolve and evolve into other things and not be the groups we’re used to.”

To some extent it doesn’t matter why Baker and SFZC parted ways. What does matter is how it came about. Monasteries are not traditionally democratic institutions either in the East or the West. The Asian precedents were clear about this. If students have difficulty with a teacher or abbot, they go somewhere else. What happened in San Francisco is that the board and membership asserted their right to place restrictions on the abbot’s behaviour, and when the abbot could not accept the restrictions, he resigned. From that point on, American Zen took a distinctly Western step towards democratization.

At the end of my 2013 conversation with Steve Stücky, Blanche Hartman, and Mel Weitsman, I had asked about the relationship between the center and Richard Baker at the time.

“We had a fiftieth anniversary celebration here last year,” Steve told me. “Zen Center was officially organized as an institution in 1962, so in 2012 we had our fiftieth anniversary. I invited him to come. Blanche had invited him here earlier. He came and gave a talk and participated in our ceremonies. I also invited him to come again last fall to visit Tassajara; so we have a pretty good relationship. But it’s also true that his memory of things that happened during the time he was here and his opinion about the ethical aspects of it and other peoples’ points of view are not all in accord. But I feel that we are in a very respectful relationship.”

“Has there been a reconciliation?”

“That may be . . .” He does not finish his thought.

“Premature,” Blanche said after a moment.

“I don’t think we’re not reconciled,” Steve pointed out.

“We’re working in that direction,” Blanche said.

Later, as she waited outside with me for my taxi to arrive, she expressed regret that Zen Center had not been able to reconcile with Baker. “But,” she told me sadly, “he couldn’t admit that he had done anything wrong. But if you really want to know about Zen Center, you need to speak to him.”

Ten years later, David Chadwick tells me, “I gave a talk at Green’s once to Zen Center donors and stuff in 2000, and I started off by making a toast to Richard Baker, I said, ‘Without whom, none of us would be here.’”

Dosho Port tells me that during dokusan with Baker once he told him, “A teacher has to survive being made into an archetype by his students.”

All three of the abbots I spoke to during that first interview are now dead. Steve Stücky died just a few months later from pancreatic cancer that he hadn’t realized he had at the time of our conversation. Blanche Hartman died – not in residence at City Center as she would have chosen – three years later, in 2016. Mel Weitsman died in 2021, at the age of 91.

Since that day in March 2013, I have conducted more than 220 interviews. However, as much as I would like to have heard his side of the story about the San Francisco Zen Center, I have not been able to interview Richard Baker. It is the interview I most regret not being able to do.

Post script: I have made several attempts to contact Baker over the years, and this past August [2023], I received an email from him in which he agreed to do an interview; however, to date he has not replied to my follow-up correspondence trying to organize a videoconference call.

The Third Step East: 125-44; 9, 20, 86, 90, 102, 105, 107, 152, 167, 168, 169, 201, 217, 220-22, 224, 225, 226, 229, 233

Cypress Trees in the Garden: 16, 25-27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 59, 149, 242, 276, 277, 279, 410

The Story of Zen: 5, 6, 263-69, 266-270, 276-77, 279, 280, 286, 299, 301, 306-07, 309, 312-20, 337, 345, 346, 351-53, 354, 355, 378, 424