Shunryu Suzuki

Suzuki arrived in San Francisco in 1959, aged fifty-five, to lead a small Japanese-American congregation, and found young Americans turning up wanting to sit. He let them. The San Francisco Zen Center grew out of that, and then Tassajara, the first Zen training monastery outside Asia. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind was assembled by a student from transcripts of his talks, and its argument is that the beginner's mind, holding many possibilities, is worth more than the expert's, which holds few. He died of cancer in 1971.