Forum: San Francisco Zen Center at Fifty
Sunday, August 5, 2012 at 7:50PM
Photo Courtesy of SFZCIntroduction by David Chadwick
The teacher was ready; the students came. Without a plan, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in San Francisco on May 23, 1959. The Zen garden of America had been fertilized by Nyogen Senzaki, Paul Reps, D.T. Suzuki, the Beats, Alan Watts, and the First Zen Institute of America in New York. Instant satori and the inscrutable orient were on people’s minds.
Fall 2012,
Forum,
Zen Buddhism 





Commentary: Three Levels of Transmission
Recently I empowered two of my senior students—Rinso Ed Sattizahn and Kuzan Peter Schireson—as full-fledged independent Zen teachers, in a weeklong ceremony we call dharma transmission in the Soto Zen tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. The ceremony has many aspects, but two are paramount: lineage and precepts. As I studied these aspects of the ceremony, I found it useful to understand each of them as having three levels: outer, inner, and innermost.
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