Tassajara Stories

A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West: The First Year, 1967

By: David Chadwick

Narrated by: David Chadwick

A Spirituality & Practice “Best Spiritual Book of 2025”

“As priceless as discovering a previously unknown time capsule.”—Peter Coyote (Hosho Jishi), actor, director, author

This is what happened at the famous Zen monastery south of San Francisco.

From the best-selling author of the biography of Shunryu Suzuki (Crooked Cucumber), comes a memoir and oral history of Tassajara—a monastery founded in 1967 by Shunryu Suzuki, abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Peopled like a Sixties film of Buddhist invasion, with hippies, dreamers, lovers, a wave of serious practitioners. Nyogen Senzaki, D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and of course Shunryu Suzuki and Richard Baker are all here. This is the story of what happened at and surrounding the founding of the first Zen monastery in the West.

©2025 David Chadwick (P)2025 Monkfish Book Publishing

Critic reviews

“I have great respect for David Chadwick. He is one of the pioneers spreading dharma in the West. All my students study his books. I know all readers will love this book and these stories.”—Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

“Two in three Americans today say they are ‘spiritual,’ while one in four identifies as ‘spiritual but not religious.’ For full immersion in one of the deepest well-springs of this widespread cultural revolution, dive into these stories of free spirits and seekers creating a uniquely western monastic community rooted in centuries of Zen Buddhist practice and led by a teacher true to the moment. No one tells it better than David Chadwick, with a firsthand feel for the high adventure and deep play of mind-changing history embodied in the making.”—Steven M. Tipton, author of In and Out of Church: The Moral Arc of Spiritual Change in America

“This book is as priceless as discovering a previously unknown time capsule. David Chadwick, widely known as one of Suzuki Roshi’s favorites, captures the wacky spirit, the dedication, and the courage required to leap into the unknown that characterized the earliest Zen students surrounding Suzuki Roshi. (Full disclosure: David became one of my earliest friends when I began my practice in 1974.) Fifty-one years later, an ordained priest and transmitted teacher, I still look up to David as an original member of the A-team. This book, in his authentic and unduplicable voice, is an absolute treasure. Read it. Give a copy to a friend.”—Peter Coyote (Hosho Jishi), actor, director, author

Zen emerging in the US

To a newcomer to San Francisco Zen Center in the late 1970s, David Chadwick was something of a mercurial presence. His home base was a converted chicken coop on a friend’s property down the road from Green Gulch Farm. In contrast to many of his fellow priests, his manner was anything but sober or serious. It felt like he knew the inside jokes, and he wanted to share them with you, if only you could get him to pause long enough. As maître d’ in the early years of Greens, he was warm, gracious, engaging. Tassajara Stories brings all these aspects, and many more, of Chadwick's to the fore — it is a seamless blend of memoir, history, and Zen teachings, told in a rich and patient baritone.