Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki (review)

Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki by David Chadwick. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. 432 pages, cloth $26.

I was an eleventh grader at Berkeley High School in the late 1970s when an intense, quiet boy gave me a copy of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and told me with authority that my aura was yellow. I knew nothing about Shunryu Suzuki or the Zen Center, yet my life was deeply changed by the teachings of the man whose own Zen master had called "crooked cucumber," implying that he was shriveled on the vine--useless. History proved the master quite wrong, of course. Through Suzuki's teachings, book, lectures, and Zazen sessions, Zen took root in America and blossomed for good. Though his achievements were vast, it was mostly through the example of his daily life that his students came to understand the true nature of Zen. David Chadwick's Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki gives those of us who did not know Suzuki the opportunity to learn about him, and those who did the chance to relive the birthing of Zen in America.

In 1993 Chadwick--who was ordained by Suzuki in 1971 and was a founding member of the Zen Mountain Center--asked Suzuki's wife, Mitsu, if he could write about his former teacher, and she responded, "Tell many funny stories . . . Hojo-san liked funny stories. Everyone will be very happy to read them." Chadwick does just that. This greatly entertaining and often inspiring biography uses a collagelike narrative composed of interviews with family, friends, and disciples and also contains photographs, conversations, anecdotes, and lectures--many published for the first time.

With an insider's view that is both subjective and fair, Chadwick conveys the man and his work and illuminates the profound effect Suzuki had on those around him, whether he was teaching or merely moving stones in his garden. Through his own words, we can see that as he taught, he also learned from his students, and over the years a dialogue ensued between them. In the end, Chadwick's book is more than a biography: it's also a record of the meeting of hearts and minds--a great testament to the universal power of compassion and a supple intellect.

Suzuki's road to America was crooked indeed. The son of a Zen master, he left home to apprentice under Gyokujun So-on and became a monk at thirteen. While studying in the spiritual lineage of Dogen at the rigid Eiheji monastery, he suffered an eye accident involving a meat hook and struggled with a difficult master. When he became a houseboy to a British woman who had been tutor to the Chinese emperor, he introduced this formidable person to Zen and she introduced him to Western sensibilities and helped him advance his knowledge of English. This experience deepened his desire to spread Zen teachings abroad, but his efforts were thwarted by his master.

By the time the fifty-three-year-old Suzuki arrived in California in 1959 with his "old robe and shiny head" but not his family, the Zen road had already been paved by the Beats and Alan Watts. Furthermore, another Suzuki had arrived in America fifty years earlier to teach Zen. But while Daisetsu Suzuki lectured at Harvard and promulgated a more traditional view of Zazen--including the attainment of satori (enlightenment)--Shunryu focused on a simpler awareness, one in which students could "learn from themselves in their own time." For example, when asked "What is true Zazen?" he would respond, "When you become you." Often mistaken for Daisetsu, he once explained, "He's the big Suzuki, I'm the little one."

Suzuki was distinctly un-doctrinaire. He made vegetarian students eat hamburgers and cleaned students' filthy apartments when invited for dinner. For him, Zen wasn't about sitting in the dojo at the Zen Center...