Suzuki came to San Francisco in 1959 expecting to minister to the small Japanese-American Zen community. He found, instead, a generation of Americans hungry for practice. His talks, collected as Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, became the most widely read Western introduction to Soto Zen.
His central teaching: the beginner’s mind holds many possibilities; the expert’s mind holds few. Practice is the continuous return to not-yet-knowing — which is, precisely, what Zazen is for.