Shunryu Suzuki's Class That Became a Zen Center

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi together with his American students, growing out of a class on Buddhism he had been asked to teach after arriving in San Francisco in 1959 as priest of a local Soto Zen temple. What began as an informal class taught by a newly arrived Japanese priest grew, within three years, into a formally organized center with its own institutional life independent of the single temple where Suzuki had first been asked to teach it.

In 1966, at Suzuki's own direction, his student Richard Baker helped complete the purchase of Tassajara Hot Springs in Los Padres National Forest, founding Tassajara Zen Mountain Center as a practice site under the Center, the first Zen Buddhist monastery established outside Asia in the tradition's own long history. The move from a single city class to a mountain monastery within four years marks one of the fastest institutional expansions in the modern history of Zen Buddhism's own spread into the United States. Suzuki himself had arrived in San Francisco in 1959 already an ordained Soto Zen priest rather than a lay teacher improvising a new tradition, giving the Center's rapid growth a foundation of established religious authority rather than an entirely improvised American innovation from the very start.