Thank You and Okay: An American Zen Failure in Japan. This item is unavailable.Thank You and Okay: An American Zen Failure in Japan

David Chadwick, an American student of Zen, living in the Bay area and working as maitre'd at the famous restaurant in the Green Gulch Zen Centre, decided to move to Japan to continue his training. Each of the vignettes or episodes of this book contributes to an account of his encounters with Japan, both inside and beyond the monastery walls. Gradually, the reader gets to know the various characters in his new world - the bickering monks, the neighbouring housewives, the ominous insects, the helpful bureaucrats, the patient abbot, the infuriating English-language students - as they work inexorably towards the initiation of the hero into the mysteries.

David Chadwick selected and edited the accounts that make up To Shine One Corner of the World, drawing on hundreds of interviews and notes amassed in the creation of his acclaimed biography of Suzuki, Crooked Cucumber, and from his ongoing oral history of Shunryu Suzuki. Chadwick himself began study Zen with Suzuki Roshi in 1966 and was ordained by him in 1971. He is also the author of Thank You and OK!: An American Zen Failure in Japan.