David Chadwick, a Longtime Supporter of the San Francisco Zen Center, Has Died

Soto Zen priest, writer, musician, poet, podcaster, historian, and world traveler David Chadwick died on February 23, 2026. Chadwick was the preeminent biographer of the Soto Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and chronicler, via cuke.com and the Cuke Archives, of the life and times of the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) that Suzuki founded in 1961 and its associated centers, notably Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (Zenshinji), the first Zen Buddhist monastery in America. Chadwick’s death, two weeks after his 81st birthday, was at a hospital in Sanur, Bali, where he lived with his wife, Katrinka McKay. 

Chadwick had been undergoing intensive treatment for Stage IV gastric nodal cancer, a slow-growing cancer that had spread to nearby lymph nodes. In a post on SFZC’s Instagram page, Peter Ford, managing director of the Cuke Archives, wrote that “although his passing was not totally unexpected, it happened more quickly than we hoped.” Chadwick was “always working on various aspects of the archives,” Ford said, and shortly before his death, “when he was too weak to continue his chemotherapy, he sent me a number of corrections he wanted to make sure were included in the next volume of Tassajara Stories,” Chadwick’s planned series aimed at “preserving the legacy of Suzuki Roshi and those whose paths crossed his.” The first volume, Tassajara Stories: A Sort of Memoir/Oral History of the First Zen Buddhist Monastery in the West—The First Year, 1967, was published by Monkfish in 2025. Book Two, which covers the years 1968 to 1971, is due out in September 2026. Chadwick was working on a third volume just before his death.

The book drew praise from the Zen community. Former governor of California Jerry Brown, who told Tricycle he had visited Tassajara while he was governor and had “made many visits” to SFZC’s city center, called Tassajara Stories “engrossing,” and “alive.” Actor-director Peter Coyote, a Zen priest who became friends with Chadwick when he lived at SFZC in the 1970s, said that he had “capture[d] the wacky spirit, the dedication, and the courage required to leap into the unknown that characterized the earliest Zen students surrounding Suzuki Roshi.”

More than a hard worker, Chadwick was, by all accounts, a larger-than-life personality—a brilliant, irrepressible, funny, and highly creative participant in whatever he turned his sights to. “What struck me about David was his curiosity,” recalled Nikko Odiseos, president of Shambhala Publications, which published a new edition of Chadwick’s memoir Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan, as well as two books of Suzuki’s teaching stories and anecdotes, Zen is Right Here and Zen is Right Now, edited by Chadwick. In a tribute posted on the Shambhala website, Odiseos called Chadwick “a storyteller to his bones. It was a constant stream, always full of delight.” 

Thank You and OK! is even mentioned in a PhD dissertation, reported David Guy in an article on American Zen. But the book for which Chadwick was probably best known is Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki, published in 1999. Chadwick’s biography is widely hailed as the definitive account of Suzuki Roshi, who was one of the first of the Japanese Zen masters to introduce Zen Buddhism to America, and to some, the most influential. (The title is the nickname Suzuki Roshi’s teachers gave him as a novice because of his “forgetful and unpredictable nature.” In Japanese folklore, cucumbers are associated with the kappa, a mischievous water spirit.) Chadwick’s own published work includes an autobiographical novel, To Find the Girl from Perth, that was described as “delightfully mischievous” by film producer Gaetano Kazuo Maida, executive director of the Buddhist Film Foundation. Another volume in Chadwick’s oeuvre is the tongue-in-cheek The, The Book—80 pages of nothing but the word  “the” repeated over and over. 

Chadwick’s output extended to other art forms as well: He was host of the Cuke Audio Podcast, on which he interviewed noteworthy Zen Buddhists, and the keeper of several websites. His extensive creative output as songwriter-musician-poet is featured on defusermusic.com, under the sobriquet “DC the mediocre, the bad, and the awful.” The site includes links to recordings of his rock bands, Defuser and Baliyuga, and to albums with titles like Drake’s Nightmare, Moonfood, and Boat of Dreams. There is also a list of more than 1,250 songs, most of them linked to typed or scribbled lyrics and, in many cases, to scratchy self-recordings of Chadwick singing and playing the guitar. “I Hate Zen,” a song he wrote in 1971, five years into his Zen practice, contains the lyrics: “I hate Zen / even though it is my friend./ Just can’t win. / It follows me until the end.” 

Hate or not,  despite his habit of calling himself a “failed Zen student,” from the time he started sitting at the Zen Center until his death, Chadwick remained connected to Soto Zen and to preserving Suzuki Roshi’s legacy. A remembrance of Chadwick in SFZC’s Sangha News Journal says of his dedication to the websites he founded and oversaw as pooh-bah: “He worked for decades with volunteers to collect, edit, digitize, and freely share these materials, ensuring that the voice and presence of his teacher would remain accessible worldwide.” 

Chadwick’s legacy is likely to be more freewheeling. A blurb for his memoir Thank You and OK! on the publisher’s website characterizes him as “a Texas-raised wanderer, college dropout, bumbling social activist, and hobbyhorse musician”—all of which is true, though it completely ignores his sixty-year engagement with Zen. 

The seeds of Zen, or at least openness to it, were planted early on. Born David Reich Chadwick in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1945, he cited as a positive force his father, a onetime reader in the Christian Science church who quit because he found it “too dualistic” and turned to the New Thought Movement and the Transcendentalists, which both bore Buddhist influences. His dad died when Chadwick was 11, but not before he had passed on his belief in the power of thought. “In our home, God was not an outside power, it was mind,” Chadwick said. 

After high school, Chadwick attended college for half a year, had a brush with the civil rights movement, and spent a year in Mexico, where he first took LSD. A self-styled “semi-hippie,” in 1966, he moved to San Francisco and did more psychedelics. “I had really profound  experiences,” he later said, but like many people who dropped acid in the sixties he realized “that’s not going to do it”—insofar as leading to lasting transformation. After he “stumbled on some books on Zen,” he decided to slow down and learn to meditate. 

Chadwick was 21 in 1966, when he turned up at SFZC, saying, “I think I need a teacher and to meditate as a group.” Suzuki Roshi was in Japan at the time; regardless, Chadwick “plunged in,” taking preliminary meditation instruction from Katagiri Roshi, who was then living at the center. Chadwick committed to a year of practice—then “never thought about it again,” he later said. 

“Plunged in” is an understatement. Chadwick arrived at an exciting time for the San Francisco Zen Center and the flourishing of Zen in America, and over the next fifteen or so years, he held several positions in the organization of increasing responsibility. Suzuki Roshi had originally come to San Francisco to guide a temple of Japanese American Buddhists, but the enthusiasm of his Western students gave him hope of revitalizing a tradition he thought was stagnating in Japan. Chadwick helped develop the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center near Carmel, California, America’s first Zen Buddhist monastery, which opened in 1967 as a place for retreats and “focused practice.” Chadwick went on to serve as practice leader, assistant director, and director at Tassajara. When an interviewer once asked Chadwick what he expected to get out of living at a monastery, he replied, “One of the fundamental teachings from a Soto point of view is not to seek an end, not to seek a goal. . . [W]hat you are doing is learning how to practice, how to cultivate yourself, how to be somebody who awakens, and to accept yourself as you are.” Still, he acknowledged that you can’t really study Buddhism without any goal. “So it’s completely paradoxical, and [Suzuki would] say if it’s not paradoxical, it’s not true, it’s not Buddhism.”

Suzuki Roshi waved off discussions of enlightenment and transmission. “He said practice is enlightenment,” Chadwick recalled, and of transmission said, “There’s nothing to transmit.” So what did he teach? people often asked. “He taught be yourself. He said, ‘All I have to teach you is zazen and practice.’ ” That, too, is a paradox, Chadwick told an interviewer, since Suzuki Roshi’s teaching stories are numerous and legendary. Some of which are collected in his classic work, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. 

Before Suzuki died, in 1971, he ordained Chadwick. After Richard Baker Roshi, Suzuki’s first dharma heir, became abbot of SFZC, he called on Chadwick, who was living at Tassajara, to help the Zen Center develop other centers and enterprises. Chadwick held posts at the City Center, at Green Gulch (SFZC’s organic farm in Marin County), and at the Green Gulch grocery store and vegetarian restaurant Greens in San Francisco. At times, he was going back and forth between the SFZC outposts, sometimes holding offices at two different places at once. Somewhere in all that, he spent six months studying Japanese at the language school in Monterey, California. 

In 1988, Chadwick was ready to switch gears. By this time, he had left Tassajara and married and divorced. When his ex-wife moved to Spokane, Washington, with their son, Kelly, Chadwick moved to Japan for what he referred to as “voluntary exile and remedial Zen education.” He and his new wife supported themselves teaching English, and his second son, Clay, was born. Chadwick initially spent half a year at Shogoji, a Soto Zen temple in Kyushu, then checked out other Zen centers and teachers.

Chadwick remained in Japan until 1992. During a side trip to Bali, a friend, the literary agent Michael Katz, urged him to write a book about his eye-opening, sometimes hilarious experiences navigating Japanese culture in and out of the monastery. Chadwick demurred, but Katz persisted, suggesting that his letters to family and friends could be put together as a book. Thank You and OK! was the result. 

Since Katagiri Roshi figured in Thank You and OK!—Chadwick called him “my Zen uncle”—it seemed fitting to write a book about his primary teacher, Suzuki Roshi. Over time, as he accumulated an impressive array of Suzuki and SFZC material, some of it contributed by sangha members, Chadwick assumed the role of archivist, launching cuke.com and shunryusuzuki.com, the heart of the Cuke Archives. 

In 2013, Chadwick moved to Bali with his soon-to-be wife, Katrinka McKay. They married in July 2015 on the beach in Sanur. He continued working on his music and overseeing the Cuke Archives. 

Richard Baker Roshi once said of Chadwick, “Years of Zen training gone to waste.” Though Chadwick often called himself a failure, he was anything but, as the untold number of people he helped—and delighted—would attest. Summing up his encounter with Zen, Chadwick posted the following on cuke.com in 2020: “I marvel now how fortunate I was to have walked through that doorway [of the Zen Center], met Shunryu Suzuki, Dainin Katagiri, and all the inspiring fellow students, friends, and teachers through the years that followed.” 

For more on David Chadwick, read his account of Katagiri’s funeral; an excerpt from Tassajara Stories; and Jeffrey Zaleski’s review of Thank You and OK!