Tassajara, the First Zen Monastery Founded Outside Asia

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 grew into one of the most influential Zen organizations in the United States and remains active today, running three connected practice communities: its city temple, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and Green Gulch Farm, together forming a single organizational structure spanning urban, mountain and rural practice settings rather than one center operating alone.

Tassajara continues today as the monastery Richard Baker helped establish at Suzuki's direction in 1966, still the first Zen Buddhist monastery founded outside Asia six decades after its own founding, and its continued operation alongside the city temple and Green Gulch Farm gives San Francisco Zen Center a breadth of practice settings, urban teaching, monastic training and rural farm life, that few other American Zen organizations founded in the same period have matched or sustained continuously across more than sixty years. The Center's own growth from Shunryu Suzuki's single Buddhism class in 1959 to three separate practice communities today reflects a deliberate expansion strategy carried forward by his own students long after his death, rather than the founder's own direct hand extending across every later addition to the organization.