Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘When I was a graduate student at Berkeley back in the early 70s, studying with Suzuki Roshi, the founder of this monastery, I was looking for a topic to write about for my master’s thesis and Suzuki Roshi said, “Why don’t you do this text – ‘The Mountains and Waters Sutra’” – he said, “I love this text and I would love to have an English translation of it and then give a series of lectures on it.” And last year, [1998] you know Gil Fronsdal set up a conference about the life of Suzuki Roshi that got a lot of us remembering him, thinking about him again and got Michael [Wenger] interested in getting me to talk about what it was like working with Suzuki Roshi to translate this “Mountains and Waters Sutra” which we did here at Tassajara the last summer that Suzuki Roshi was down here and then he got sick during that summer and, as you know, he passed away that year. 

That is all I had to tell Michael about the experience of working with Suzuki Roshi – just that it was much nicer doing that than digging the latrines up there for the hill cabins which I had done the summer before [laughter].

But, in any case, because of that kind of wave of nostalgia that went through a lot of us about Suzuki Roshi, this book and the time in which I translated it came back to me and coincidently at the same time one of my graduate students is doing a dissertation on the American Buddhist poet Gary Snyder who had just published, a couple of years ago, a big – I mean for a poet – a big book, long book called “Mountains and Rivers Without End” that he had begun back in the 50s and worked through all these years and finally brought it out and so this graduate student organized a seminar on Gary Snyder, brought him to Stanford and brought Gary down to Stanford to do a reading – a long reading to a packed house down at Stanford.

We were amazed that young Stanford students would even know who Gary Snyder was. I mean it wasn’t just old hippies in the audience, there were a long of young – 500 people in the audience maybe.

At that point Gary said that in the early 70s when Dick Baker gave him the translation that I had done down here of “Mountains and Waters Sutra” it set him back 10 years because what was in that thing was so problematic and so juicy for his topic of Mountains and Rivers Without End that he set to brooding about it.’ (from Cuke.com)