David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki (1999) — Book Review

01 October 2015

A remarkable volume — best suited to an American Zen audience

David Chadwick’s Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki (Broadway Books, 1999) manages to tell Shunryu Suzuki’s Soto Zen story through subtle Buddhist-oriented eyes.

I cannot recall ever having read something of similar 414 page length that so unobtrusively illustrates its own theme.

Whether non-Zen folk will appreciate this, I cannot say. As “just” biography, the book is still exceptional, even without the overlayers of meaning that peek out from beneath its down-to-earth writing. The difficult-to-do research and diligent craft that David Chadwick brought to this book is beyond admirable.

Samples

Regarding Suzuki’s legacy

“Nobody can tell you about the past,” Maezumi [another Zen master] said.

“What’s important is now what happen or didn’t happen back then. What’s important is what we have here now — this wonderful farm with the big barn zendo and the conference center where we’re all meeting, so many people coming here for lecture and zazen.

“There’s Page Street in the city and Tassajara. So many people sitting zazen all over America, even Europe.

“When he came, there was none of this. Many priests came before him. Even before this century, all kinds of priests in the Zen tradition came to America. We don’t really know why, but until he came, no started anything that lasted. After him, so much happened. That’s what I most appreciate.”

An impossible question — answered

One night in February of 1968, I sat among fifty black-robed fellow students, mostly young Americans, at Zen Mountain Center, Tassajara Springs, ten miles inland from Big Sur, California, deep in the mountain wilderness. The kerosene lamplight illuminated our breath in the winter air of the unheated room.

I bowed, hands together, and caught his eye.

“Hai?” he said, meaning yes.

“Suzuki-roshi, I’ve been listening to your lectures for years,” I said . . . . but I feel like I could listen to you for a thousand years and still not get it. Could you just please put it in a nutshell? Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase?”

Everyone laughed. He laughed. What a ludicrous question. I don’t think any of us expected him to answer it. He was not a man you could pin down, and he didn’t like to give his students something definite to cling to. He had often said not to have “some idea” of what Buddhism was.

But Suzuki did answer. He looked at me and said, “Everything changes.”

On direct experience and (equally) the importance of those who teach

In education class, a professor said something that further inspired Shunryu to drop his hindsight and foresight and live directly in the moment.

“Formal education is to explain what is and what it means. Actual education is to let it be, whatever it is, without explanation.”

He couldn’t accept that at first, but he came to see the connection — that one had to begin practice without knowing the way-seeking mind and for “a long, long time go round and round and round in the same area until yet get tired of trying to understand.”

Regarding Suzuki’s less than admirable behavior with his family

Shunryu’s children saw him as esteemed, distant, and preoccupied, and this was even harder on them than his temper. . . .

He told them that their mother was dead, that she had died at the hands of Otsubo. Then he said, “Please do not hate this man who killed your mother. Rather you should hate me, because I ddin’t listen to her or to Obaa-san or to you when you all warned me about him.”

He continued to confess responsibility for his wife’s death to everyone he spoke to. “It was my fault,” he said to Amano, his godfather and confidant. “I was too stubborn. I wouldn’t bend. I was so wrong.”

An example of forgiveness

[Years later, his daughter] Yasuko saw her father in a new light in America. . . .

She could finally forgive him for the death of her mother and saw his accomplishments in America not only as atonement for but as partially motivated by her death.

She thought of the time in the fifth grade when he’d taken her to Shizuoka City and, embarrassed to be seen with him, she’d walked on the other side of the street. She didn’t feel that gap now.

“The bond between children and parents is never lost,” he told her.

Snippets of Suzuki’s thinking

Things are always changing, so nothing can be yours.

The only way to endure your pain is to let it be painful.

In reflecting on our problems, we should include ourselves.

Our way has no end and no beginning, and from this way we cannot escape.

Problems are actually your zendo.

The point is where you don’t expect it to be.

Life is like stepping onto a boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink.

The salt waves and wind metaphor makes me smile. Maybe you, too?

There are many more of these in Chadwick’s biography of Shunryu Suzuki.

Crooked Cucumber — recommended more highly than I can express

Zen’s heart:

“I don’t know,” he said, “is the first principle.”

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David Chadwick, Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki (1999) — Book Review