Word: suzuki
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Stith purchased her bike, a black Suzuki Intruder 800 with blue flames and everything, in the fall, after responding to a want ad in a Boston paper. She had tried to purchase her bike from a dealer but discovered that such a plan would not be feasible on her limited budget...
...first of Suzuki's visitors was a charismatic but rudderless young Harvard dropout named Richard Baker. Baker soon became Suzuki's primary student and confidant, and through their combined charms and abilities, the center grew from a shoestring institution with a handful of members and an annual budget of around $2,000 to something of a mini empire. At the height of its popularity and influence in the '70s, Zen Center's assets included a best-selling cookbook, a hugely popular vegetarian restaurant, and Tassajara, the first American Buddhist monastery, located amid rugged, gorgeous forestland 240 km south...
...chronicles the predictable drift from the heady promise of Zen Center's early days to the sourness and disillusionment that followed its growth into a spiritual brand name. As Zen Center's membership and renown increased, so too did Baker's sense of self-importance and entitlement. In 1971, Suzuki died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 69. Before he did so, he established Baker as his sole American dharma heir, making him the uncontestable arbiter of Zen Center's fate. The honor did nothing to curb Baker's more questionable character traits. "In a time when...
...that satisfying. Is he a complex and tormented visionary, a sage victimized by his own abilities or just another jerk in ceremonial robes? Ultimately, Downing leaves the decision to the reader. There are really no completely clean, morally unambiguous figures in Downing's story?and that includes even Shunryu Suzuki himself, who, wise and lovable as he might have been, certainly suffered from his own distinctive set of follies and foibles. Evangelizing America, it turns out, was only part of the master's plan. He also nurtured the somewhat grandiose dream of using his new American followers to help...
...separate?and bigger?than the imperfect individuals who achieve and transmit them, that means they're still valid even after those individuals lose the thread and mess up. American Zen, that peculiar hybrid of Japanese and American sensibilities that was planted on California's shores in the '60s by Suzuki, Baker and others, may have been damaged by the scandals and embarrassments that Downing chronicles, but that's a far cry from saying it was done in by them...