San Francisco Zen Center

San Francisco Zen Center was established in 1962 by Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi and his American students. Suzuki-Roshi is known to
countless readers as the author of the modern spiritual classic, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. The purpose of San Francisco Zen Center
is to make accessible and embody the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha as expressed in the Soto Zen tradition established by
Dogen Zenji in 13th-century Japan and conveyed to us by Suzuki Roshi and other Buddhist teachers. The Zen Center's practice flows
from the insight that all beings are Buddha, and that sitting in meditation is itself the realization of Buddha nature, or enlightenment.

Today, San Francisco Zen Center is one of the largest Buddhist sanghas outside Asia. It has three practice places: City Center,
in the vibrant heart of San Francisco; Green Gulch Farm, whose organic fields meet the ocean in Marin County; and Tassajara
Zen Mountain Center - the first Zen training monastery in the West - in the Ventana Wilderness inland from Big Sur. These
three complementary practice centers offer daily meditation, regular monastic retreats and practice periods, classes, lectures, and
workshops. Zen Center is a practice place for a diverse population of students, visitors, lay people, priests, and monks guided by
teachers who follow in Suzuki Roshi's style of warm hand and heart to warm hand and heart. Zen Center programs also reach out to
the community, helping prisoners, the homeless, and those in recovery; protecting the environment; and working for peace. Suzuki
Roshi's disciples and students of his disciples now lead dharma groups around the country.

In the spirit of Beginner's Mind, Zen Center has long been a quiet force of cultural dynamism and change, with a dedicated history of
reconsidering conventional wisdom and pushing the boundaries of cultural traditions and modes of thinking.