Photo from San Francisco Zen Center
David Reich Chadwick, Noted Author
of Crooked Cucumber, Has Died at 81
David Reich Chadwick, an American Zen priest, writer, publisher, musician, and oral historian best known for Crooked Cucumber, his biography of seminal Zen teacher and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind author Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, died in Bali, Indonesia, on February 24. He was 81 and had been undergoing treatment for cancer. His final six weeks were spent in a profoundly connective and transformative space with his family.
Suzuki’s chosen heir, Zentatsu Richard Baker, said, “David is one of the founders of the Suzuki Roshi lineage, one of the founders of the San Francisco Zen Center, and one of the founders of Tassajara… that changed our world in a certain way.”
Chadwick’s writing was characterized by a personal, anecdotal style that combines oral history with memoir. His other books include Zen Is Right Now and Zen Is Right Here, collections of stories and anecdotes about Suzuki; and Tassajara Stories, a memoir and oral history focusing on the first year of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the first Zen monastery in the West. Two completed volumes covering later years will be published. A novel, To Find the Girl from Perth, was recently republished.
Born in Texas, he was raised in a Christian Science family that became associated with the non-theistic New Thought Movement that included readings in Thoreau, Emerson, the Transcendentalists, and ancient wisdom traditions including Buddhism. After graduating high school in 1963, he spent some time in Mississippi and Chicago involved with the civil rights movement. He also lived and worked with the staff of Students for a Democratic Society and met Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. His memoir of that time, Freedom Songs: My Journey Through 1964, is set to be published.
Chadwick moved to California and began studying at the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) in 1966. He was ordained as a Buddhist priest by Suzuki in 1971, shortly before the teacher’s death. Chadwick was instrumental in the operations of the SFZC for many years, helping to develop its other centers at Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara, where he became a practice leader, and he served as the first maître d’ at Greens, its highly regarded restaurant in San Francisco.
In 1974, newly elected California Governor Jerry Brown walked the 14-mile dirt road into Tassajara with a friend. Chadwick was director there at the time, and met them at the gate, conjuring images of Tang Dynasty China governors and emperors meeting with Zen masters. That was Brown’s first contact with Zen Center, with which he remained connected.
In the early 1980s Chadwick wrote and recorded several albums of original songs with professional musicians and friends, including World Suicide, Music for a Comic Book Video, and others. His and Hot Tuna’s recording engineer Rick Sanchez once said, “If David Byrne, Captain Beefheart, Dan Hicks, and an extra-terrestial were thrown in a blender, you might get something like David Chadwick.”
In 1988, he began four years of living in Japan for what he characterized as “remedial” training, experiences which he later documented in Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan. He lived in Bali with his wife Katrinka McKay for the last thirteen years of his life, where he continued to work on books and record new original songs with a local band he organized, Baliyuga. He spoke four languages, studying and practicing while in the respective countries being a great joy.
His first three marriages led to lifelong friends. He is survived by his sons Kelly and Clay, his sister Susan, his niece Camille, and his wife Katrinka.
His legacy is firmly rooted in his probono leadership of Cuke Archives, a massive, ongoing project dedicated to preserving the legacy of Suzuki and the community that surrounded him. Chadwick was the founder and self-described “poo-bah,” gathering and making accessible thousands of hours of audio, transcripts, photos, and personal memories. He also produced and posted hundreds of podcast interviews with people connected in one way or another with Shunryu Suzuki circles. Noted poet Jane Hirshfield, who was also an early resident at Tassajara, said, “He never made anything into an institution, or about himself. He just did what he did, with unstinting dedication and a kind of joyous appreciation of all beings’ existence, and people would step in to help.”
Through his writing, he broke from idealized, reverent depictions of Zen masters, presenting Suzuki as a “crooked cucumber”—a flawed, relatable, yet profoundly effective human being. He once said, “Suzuki made a great effort minute after minute and that’s what I see in countless people who pass through his zendos and read some of what he said... And in the middle of this effort is his playful spirit saying ‘don’t be too serious.’ He gave us a practice, and the confidence that we could find out the truth for ourselves.”
Chadwick was irreverent and self deprecating, once asking Suzuki semi-seriously, “I must admit I just don’t understand. Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase? Could you please put it in a nutshell?” Everyone laughed. But Suzuki did answer. “He looked at me and said, ‘Everything changes.’”
—Gaetano Kazuo Maida