--- from Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, Chapter 16, p. 309

***

Around 1966 I saw Suzuki Roshi for the first time at the Human Be-in, an early rock concert held in Golden Gate Park just past Speedway Meadows in the Polo Fields.

Beneath the billowing skydiver's chute he seemed an elfin, compact, Oriental, sitting quietly near the front edge of an impromptu stage created with a flatbed truck trailer, with one giant exception: he was surrounded by 10,000 dancing hippies tripping on LSD!

--- Rene Pittet

***

There were also a few genuine seers and artists like poet Gary Snyder, back from ten years of studying Zen in Japan; his old crony, Allen Gins-berg; and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, abbot of the nearby San Francisco Zen Center, solid as a rock, smiling and enjoying himself.

--- Peter Coyote - more at excerpt from his book, Sleeping Where I Fall

***

"A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In," announced on the cover of the new issue of the San Francisco Oracle, would feature Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Richard (Ram Dass) Alpert, Dick Gregory, Lenore Kandel, Jerry Ruben, and All SF Rock Bands January 14, 1967, 1 to 5 pm in Golden Gate Park 30,000 people showed up. The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service and others called the tune. Leary, in his first San Francisco appearance, uttered the sound bite of the decade: "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out." Oracle publisher and Be-In co-organizer Allen Cohen characterized the event as a necessary meeting-of-the-minds, bringing together the philosphically opposed factions of the late 1966 San Francisco-based counter culture: on one side, the Berkeley radicals, who were tending toward increased militancy in response to the U.S. government's Vietnam war policies, and, on the other side, the Haight-Ashbury hippies, who, with the help of psychotropic compounds and various spiritual guides, saw the cosmic karma in it all, and urged peaceful protest and ongoing joyful celebration. The Be-In focused the key ideas of the 1960s counter-culture: personal power, decentralization, ecological awareness, consciousness expansion. More encompassing than a war protest movement, the counter culture "questioned authority" in regard to civil rights, women's rights, and consumer rights, shaped its own alternative media - the "underground" newspapers and radio stations, and spawned new directions in music, art, and technology. In the 1970s, the dynamic San Francisco area milieu, blending Silicon Valley with Haight Ashbury and Berkeley, gave birth to the personal computer - the ultimate gesture of personal power, "counter" to the then-prevailing main frame computer paradigm that implied centralized authority.
 - from Be-in.com

7-25-17 - Dennis McNally asked: As far as you know, did Suzuki Roshi speak from the stage at the Be-In?  Mel thinks maybe, Gary Snyder thinks not…  you’re the authority!

DC responded: No. Definitely not. I'm sure I'd remember but I've been sure of other things. I'd like to know if someone says they remember him saying something which would have been I imagine a few syllables if he'd been handed a mike. It wasn't his scene. He was a guest surely enjoying the amazingness of it as many others.