San Francisco Zen Center by Rick McDaniel from his Zen Conversations and Profiles website.
From the Shunryu Suzuki lineage, McDaniel did a piece on me, DC, and my beloved 1st ex, Daya Goldschlag, Alan Block, Mary Mocine, oh - I see one on Dainin Katagiri with Dosho Port, That's just recently.
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I went over the SFZC piece for Rick and below are a few corrections I still have to make.
Sokei-an Sasaki founded the First Zen Inst. in 1930. Ruth Fuller, Alan Watt's mother-in-law came years later.
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He wrote:
"What happened in San Francisco is that the board and membership asserted their right to place restrictions on the abbot’s behavior. It was unprecedented. And when the abbot could not accept the restrictions, he resigned. From that point on, American Zen made a major departure from their Asian roots."
This is true in the master-disciple relationship but not in the priest-temple relationship. Japanese temples have boards of directors. I don't know how far back this or some such lay member governing structure goes back but I've heard of a number of cases of temple priests being replaced. Suzuki's father lost his temple, Zounin, due to a mistake he'd made. So it went to his disciple whom Suzuki got it back from. His master So-on then went on to be the priest at another temple, Rinsoin, whose priest had been forced to leave. That became Suzuki's main temple.
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when – at the age of 55 – Shunryu Suzuki had the opportunity to be posted at Sokoji, he accepted it with alacrity.
He turned it down for a few years until he'd completed the work on his temple, Rinsoin, that his master had left for him to do. Then in 1958 he accepted and went to the US in May 1959. It's true he was eager to go, but not until the time was ripe.
