Zen Pioneer: The Life and Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki - Hardcover

Stirling, Isabel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593761104 ISBN 13: 9781593761103

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2006

Synopsis

Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who died in 1967, was a pivotal figure in the emergence and development of Zen Buddhism in the United States. She is the only Westerner — and woman — to be made a priest of a Daitoku–ji temple and was mentor to Burton Watson, Philip Yampolsky, and Gary Snyder, and mother–in–law of Alan Watts. This is the first biography of her remarkable life.

Few devoted their lives to Zen Buddhism as Ruth Fuller did. As a senior student of Sokei — an Sasaki in New York — Ruth helped him develop the infrastructure of what would eventually become The First Zen Institute in New York City. She married Sasaki in 1944, and it was her mission to maintain the Institute and later, to establish The First Zen Institute of America in Japan. Her legacy remains today in the Zen facilities she helped build in New York and abroad and in the many texts she saw through translation, published from the 1950s to the 1970s. For the first time in book form, three of her writings are included here — Zen: A Religion, Zen: A Method for Religious Awakening, and Rinzai Zen Study for Foreigners in Japan.

About this title

About the Author

Isabel Stirling became active in international librarianship during her years as science librarian and professor at the University of Oregon, traveling several times to China and Japan. On one of her trips to Japan that she was invited to stay at Ryosen-an, where Ruth Sasaki had developed her formidable library. Stirling is Associate University Librarian of the University of California, Berkeley, and makes her home in Sausalito, CA.

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.

Reviews

*Starred Review* Librarian and professor Stirling first learned of the high--society Chicago matron turned Zen Buddhist priest when she visited the extensive library Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1892-1967) established in Kyoto. Now Stirling crisply portrays the famously rigorous Sasaki, whose ordination broke every Zen taboo against women and foreigners. Thanks to Ruth's first husband's business travels, she met and studied with the renowned Zen master D. T. Suzuki in Japan in 1930. Later, back in the States and widowed, she worked with Sasaki Sokei-an Roshi to establish the First Zen Institute in New York. The center opened the day before Pearl Harbor, and shortly thereafter Sokei-an was interned by the federal government. After his release, he and Ruth married (Ruth's daughter married philosopher Alan Watts), but he died within the year, leaving Ruth in charge of the center. She chose, instead, to live in Kyoto, where she wrote fluently about Zen and translated crucial Zen works into English as interest in Zen Buddhism surged in America. Accompanied by a vivid foreword by poet Gary Snyder, who worked with Sasaki, and three of -Sasaki's invaluable treatises, this meticulous and fascinating volume celebrates a visionary scholar, translator, and bridge builder. Donna Seaman
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Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1593761104
• ISBN 13: 9781593761103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320