Quote from Zen Pioneer

Zen Pioneer: The Life and Work of Ruth Fuller Sasaki

by Isabel Stirling, forward by Gary Snyder

Shoemaker & Hoard, Emeryville, California    ©2006     295 pp.

"I stood in the small, quiet library of a temple called Ryosen-an. Here, in the midst of the Daitoku-ji Temple complex in Kyoto, Japan, I first encountered the remarkable life of Ruth Fuller Sasaki.

Ryosen-an has well over a thousand books and journals in English, Japanese, Chinese French, German, and some Sanskrit covering Buddhism, philosophy, literature, Eastern religions, and Japanese culture. The library, although open, ceased acquisitions in the late 1960s. Still, there was much to discover and learn here. Shelves full of the ancient, the rare, the classic.

I stood there in Japan and realized that Ruth Fuller Sasaki was a pivotal figure in the emergence and development of Zen Buddhism in America. Ruth was a wealthy, upper-middle-class society matron of Chicago at the turn of the century, merging her Christian, Victorian upbringing with a new life of Zen Buddhism when she began studying in Japan in the early 1930s.  By luck, coincidence--and some may say karma--on her first trip to Asia in 1930 (a three-month vacation with her husband, daughter, and governess), she was introduced to Dr. Daisetz T. Suzuki by William T. McGovern, an old family friend from Chicago. On her second trip to Japan in 1932, Suzuki introduced her to a Japanese master in Kyoto, Nanshinken Roshi, who accepted her as a student."  (p. xv)

--quote submitted by Jennifer Knight

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