Home › Magazine › Spring 1993 › The Mushroom Monk: Nyogen Senzaki

The Mushroom Monk: Nyogen Senzaki

Helen Tworkov

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In 1925, the prescribed twenty years over, he began renting public halls in San Francisco with money saved from his scanty wages. In 1931, Senzaki moved to Los Angeles and opened his Mentorgarten Zendo in the modest rooms of his hotel residence in Little Tokyo. There he and his students did zazen on metal folding chairs that he had purchased secondhand from a funeral parlor; sitting cross-legged on the floor in the customary meditation posture struck him as a most un-American activity.

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