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many offers. The Monterey County Roughriders—who would ride on horseback up the Arroyo Seco and over the Horse Pasture Trail to Tassajara—put in a bid. So did the publisher of Sunset magazine and the vice president of Pacific Gas & Electric. On behalf of Zen Center, Allen Ginsberg asked Bob Dylan if he would buy Tassajara, but Dylan wanted to build a house there, and that squelched the deal.
    The Becks’ decision to sell Tassajara to Zen Center, for less money than they could have received from other interested parties, ultimately helped Buddhism flourish in America. For Robert Beck, who wasn’t a Zen student himself—he was a teacher and antiques dealer—the deal had a destined quality. Before Beck died in 2007, he recalled the negotiations as feeling “foreordained, and it was just a question of filling in the details.” Remembering Suzuki Roshi, he said, “He exemplified the best that humans could be. He was an exemplary character, with his failures, his flaws, his faults, he still went bravely ahead and said this is possible. It’s possible to go beyond what we think we can do, and we don’t have to be heroic, we can be simple and express our convictions.”
    Much has changed in the four and a half decades that Zen Center has owned Tassajara. But what’s remarkable is how much remains the same. The practice that Suzuki Roshi nurtured has been largely preserved, handed down from one generation to the next. Tassajara remains a place for rigorous monastic training. Every year, around seventy serious practitioners of Zen leave behind whatever ties them to their lives as they know them and commit to three to six months of intense silence, study, and sitting.
    But for four months of the year, Tassajara’s gate is open to whoever wants to come—regardless of an interest or lack thereof in Zen practice. Some stumble upon Tassajara in their quest for natural hot springs. Some are drawn in by a workshop—in yoga, conscious relationships, ecology, cooking, poetry. Some in need of a respite have been sent there by sympathetic friends. Some have tattered copies of the Tassajara Bread Book on their kitchen shelves. Some are Zen students, working in exchange for the opportunity to practice residentially, part time or full time, for a few days or the entire summer. Quite a few wear priest robes.
    Tassajara is known by name around the world by people who have never been there and whose personal connection to the place may be based on a beloved recipe for jalapeño cornbread or a lecture from Suzuki Roshi’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind , now translated into Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. While fires were burning around Tassajara in June, Zen Center vice president Susan O’Connell flew to Mongolia for an international Buddhist women’s conference. She worried about being far away and out of touch, until she turned on the television in her hotel room and saw footage of Tassajara in a report on the California wildfires, on Al Jazeera.
    All kinds of people call Tassajara home. Tassajara may belong to Zen Center, but that doesn’t stop anyone who’s ever been there from feeling that it belongs to them somehow. Or that they belong to it.

    Every morning around nine a.m., shortly after the bell sounded for guest breakfast, head cook Mako Voelkel led her crew in a service. Eight or so students stood around the altar fashioned from a sycamore that fell during the first winter Zen Center owned Tassajara. A candle glowed faintly in the daylight. Incense twisted toward the roof beams. They chanted briskly, in a monotone, not emphasizing any one word over another, from thirteenth-century Soto Zen founder Eihei Dōgen’s Instructions for the Zen Cook : “Of old it was said, ‘When steaming rice, treat the pot as one’s own head; when rinsing the rice, know that the water is