Lou [Hartman] also read to me the entire volume called Crooked
Cucumber, which is the life and times of Suzuki Roshi. It was very
funny and very interesting. All the trials and tribulations that that
fella went through to get to where he was was something else. - Philip
Whalen, from an interview
by David Meltzer
"Chadwick laces the facts of Suzuki's life with relevant
fragments from his teachings, but the genius of his book lies in the way
in which at every point he lets revealing anecdotes carry the story
line. The result is a biography that brings his wise and lovable teacher
to life to an extent I would not have believed the printed word could.
Chadwick has produced a remarkable biography of a truly remarkable
man."
-Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions
"It's impossible to imagine a better book than this about Suzuki
Roshi. Crooked Cucumber possesses the virtues of its
subject--straight forward, without excess, without deficiency, without
pomp or falseness, it's a precise picture of Suzuki's values, hopes and
problems could make it a major primer of Zen itself."
-Robert Pirsig, author of Zen And The Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance
"This book is a touching account of Suzuki-roshi's life, full of
funny stories, brave and generous."
-- Robert Bly, poet and author of Iron John and The
Sibling Society
"Crooked Cucumber is a moving and eloquent biography of that
quiet man who, with Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, was to become the most
widely revered Zen teacher in this country. Conveying his spirit
lovingly and well, it becomes in itself a wonderful manifestation of his
gentle teachings.
-Peter Matthiessen, author of At Play in the Fields of the
Lord , The Snow Leopard
"Like a pebble dropped into a still pond with ever-widening
waves of resonance, here is the arc of a life unfolding across
civilizations and centuries of Buddhist practice to bring the way of Zen
into the everyday lives of a generation of American seekers. Shunryu
Suzuki taught by example, extraordinary in its ordinariness, leaving no
trace except the transparent wisdom and lucent joy of living in a world
with nothing to hold on to and everything to share. What bred this kind
of awareness in action? From his childhood in the family of a parish
priest in a rural Zen temple, his years as a young monk and scholar, and
his work as a priest in Japan in war and peace, this book yields the
intimate feel and texture of a life in the making, complicate in its
time and place yet lit by the inner curiosity of a pilgrim to be. In San
Francisco in the 1960s the surprising, surefooted genius of a veteran
Zen master, delighted to begin anew, comes into flower and bears fruit.
Here is the drama of Beat Zen and Hip Zen, desperados and dreamers,
matrons and maniacs discovering what it means to sit down on a
meditation cushion, come to your senses, and come of age. Here, too, is
the difficult adventure of discipleship and institution-building that
gave birth to San Francisco Zen Center; and the agonic, loving lesson of
a good teacher dying a good death, just as he lived, on the middle path
embracing form and emptiness, history and moment, word and breath."
-Steven Tipton, co-author of Habits of the Heart, The Good
Society, and author of Getting Saved from the Sixties.
