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training monastery would not look exactly like the monasteries where Suzuki Roshi had trained in Japan. Many of the words and forms of Japanese Zen, along with aesthetic and cultural influences, would carry over, but traditional vows of celibacy would not. In fact, in modern times, Japanese Zen priests were allowed to marry, as Suzuki Roshi had. But at this American Zen monastery—the first—women and men would actually practice and live together, side by side, as equals. People would train at Tassajara for a period of time and then return to their lives “outside the gate,” continuing to practice within the context of work, marriage, and family.
    â€œJust like China!” Suzuki Roshi proclaimed, gazing at the Ventana’s precipitous peaks and valleys. He danced in celebration in the middle of Tassajara Road.
    By bringing Zen to America—specifically, Soto Zen, a sect of Japanese Zen marked by an emphasis on zazen and the view of practice as enlightenment itself—Suzuki Roshi would continue Zen’s emigrant lineage. In the fifth century, Bodhidharma, an Indian sage, first introduced meditation practice in China; from there, Zen had spread to Japan, Vietnam, and Korea, taking on the flavor of the host cultures. America—and Tassajara—would now become what China had for the ancient Indian traveler, a new home for Zen Buddhism. A place of origination, adaptation, immersion.
    Suzuki Roshi had been looking for several years for the right place to offer more monastic training than was possible in San Francisco. The opportunity to buy Tassajara came along, observed Chadwick, “at a time when there was enough maturity and open-mindedness in America to support, in this way, a teaching that challenged many commonly held assumptions about space, time, being, life and death.”
    After a frenzy of fund-raising and with the assistance of some high-profile supporters like Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Joseph Campbell, and the Grateful Dead, San Francisco Zen Center purchased Tassajara for $300,000 in late 1966, naming it Zenshinji, or Zen Mind Temple.
    Tassajara came with its own rich history. Native Americans had used the hot springs for healing long before the descendants of Europeans discovered them. The Esselen, a peaceful tribe that once inhabited the area now known as the Ventana Wilderness, had cared for the land by intentionally setting fire to underbrush to clear paths for travel and replenish the soil. One local Esselen family, the Nasons, still live up Tassajara Road, managing a ranch, working as wilderness guides, and occasionally appearing at Tassajara to give talks on the area’s Native American heritage.
    The first known structures at Tassajara were built in the 1800s by a local hunter. By the early 1900s it had become a popular resort. Robert Beck, who owned the resort before selling it to Zen Center—short for San Francisco Zen Center—said that in Tassajara’s early days, they gave meals away and sold whiskey to make money. Immigrants from the Watsonville area near Santa Cruz came to Tassajara because the water reminded them of the springs back home in Yugoslavia. In those days, visitors didn’t just soak in the springs, they drank the mineral-rich water, called “granite wine.”
    Robert and Anna Beck purchased Tassajara in 1960, a decade after the hotel had burned down. In 1966, they hired a young Zen student named Ed Brown to wash dishes. Brown learned to bake bread in Tassajara’s kitchen. When one of the Becks’ cooks quit, he started cooking for the hot springs guests. After Zen Center acquired Tassajara, he became tenzo, or head cook. Later, Brown wrote the Tassajara Bread Book and Tassajara Cooking —launching a bread-baking revolution and making the monastery a household name in vegetarian cooking. He still teaches cooking classes at Tassajara and around the world.
    When the Becks wanted to sell Tassajara, they had