Shunryu Suzuki

Japanese Sōtō Zen monk who, more than any other figure, established Zen Buddhism on the West Coast of America and produced — through the transcripts of his San Francisco Zen Center talks — what remains the single most-read Zen book in English. Born in 1904 in Hiratsuka, Japan, the son of a Sōtō priest, he came to America in 1959 to serve a small Japanese-American congregation in San Francisco and quickly drew Western students who would form the founding generation of American Zen. From their dawn sittings he gave the talks collected in 1970 as Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind — one of the most influential Buddhist texts of the twentieth century. He died of cancer in 1971, leaving the San Francisco Zen Center, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, and Green Gulch Farm as his living legacy.