Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center [Hardcover]

Michael Downing (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2001

Words not normally associated with contemplative practice exploded from the headlines when a series of interconnected scandals rocked San Francisco Zen Center. . By the late 1970s, San Francisco Zen Center had -under the spiritual leadership of its founder, Shunryu Suzuki, and his Dharma heir, Richard Baker-grown to be hugely successful, accruing wealth, property, and prestige, its aesthetics tinged with the glamour of celebrity. Zen Center's holdings included Tassajara Hot Springs near Big Sur, Green Gulch Farm in Marin County, a clothing company, and a bakery. The Tassajara Bread Book was riding the best-seller lists and Greens, its wildly successful upscale vegetarian restaurant on the San Francisco Bay, was inspiring an entire generation of restaurant professionals. Hundreds of students who had come to dedicate their lives to Zen practice, to reinventing Buddhism in America, found themselves serving dinner to the famous: Linda Ronstadt, then-Governor Jerry Brown, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Bateson, Paul Hawken, Ken Kesey, Stewart Brand. For a long moment, Zen Center seemed to be the hot core of the counterculture. Then a sex scandal rocked Zen Center and brought into question Baker's abuse of power and spiritual authority. And before Zen Center had a chance to recover, Baker's replacement as Abbott was arrested for brandishing a handgun at the door of a neighbor's house. The repercussions were so profound as to call some to question the entire matter of alternative religious practice in America. Was this jewel of the counterculture fated to dissolve in a meltdown of its own making?Michael Downing has spent the past three years studying Zen Center documents and interviewing more than eighty people who were there, at ground zero. Every person who had a role in these events has a singular point of view, and as these multiple tellings are woven together we see a truth as coherent and complicated as Indra's net-a web in which each intersection of thread holds a jewel that reflects all the other jewels at all the other intersections. As engaging as any mystery, as mysterious as any political campaign, as political as any family gathering, this story will haunt and challenge its readers as they attempt to make their own sense of what really happened.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Why did the richest, most influential, highest flying Zen center in America crash and burn in 1983? Novelist Michael Downing wondered the same thing, and after three years of interviewing members and poring over documents, his Shoes Outside the Door tells the story. Womanizing, BMW-driving Richard Baker was the abbot and visionary behind the rapid growth of the San Francisco Zen Center, but in many ways he was the antithesis of his teacher and predecessor, the inimitable and revered Shunryu Suzuki, who would choose the bruised apples out of compassion. After the early death of Suzuki, a blind and driven cult formed around Baker, seemingly filling the void until this "Dick Nixon of Zen" finally slept with his best friend's wife and brought his world crashing to the ground. Working with direct quotations from students and workers of the Center and its many enterprises, Downing delivers a page-turning exposé of a community that is as laudable as it is laughable. And as an outsider to both the community and Buddhism, he does it with wit and an even hand. --Brian Bruya

From Publishers Weekly

This intense investigation/indictment from novelist Downing (Breakfast with Scot, etc.) uncovers the alleged abuses of power of Richard Baker, former abbot of the nation's most influential Zen center. Downing devoted three years to exploring how and why Baker, the only Dharma heir of Shunryu Suzuki, the founder of San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), was toppled from the abbacy of SFZC by popular demand in 1983. He interviewed more than 80 participants in Baker's rise and fall, not including the disgraced abbot himself, who sent Downing a letter explaining his position. Downing tells the story with a novelist's attention to character and detail, and what unfolds is a gripping account of how the bright and charismatic Baker helped Suzuki and Zen gain a foothold in the West; took over SFZC; expanded its activities dramatically (by, among other initiatives, creating the fabled Greens restaurant); grew increasingly alienated from his followers while surrounding himself with celebrities and physical luxury; and finally stumbled by having an affair with the wife of one of SFZC's main backers. The problem with the book, and it's a serious one, is that Downing takes sides; for example, he refutes point by point the text of Baker's letter to him. What might have been a grand account of the making of a tragedy, then, is instead a mitigated tale of villainy. Yet because the debacle at SFZC holds lessons for anyone who cares about how religious structures, perforce hierarchical, can and should operate within a democratic society, this book deserves a wide reading, and not only by the many Buddhists who will buy it lickety-split.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (October 16, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431132
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431130
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (43 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,087,258 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Strange American Zen, February 10, 2002

By 

Maggie the Cat (central coast of California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Hardcover)

I'm in a different position from some of the other reviewers because I was there. Speaking from that perspective, the book is dead on accurate. It is not (only) the salacious story which compells, it is the unanswered questions, questions which, I believe, most people who went through the whole thing have to continue to ask themselves. There is a deep human need to give up our hearts completely to something/someone, and in this case, this need was manipulated and abused. This is a simultaneously old and fresh story. How was it that a man convinced highly intelligent well-educated Americans to treat him like a god come to earth? Presidents and movie stars don't get the heroically self-abasing treatment Dick Baker got from his students. Baker is a remarkable person, a genuine Zen master without a moral mirror of any kind. He still can't figure out what he did wrong.
It was enormously educational to be at Zen Center just before the Debacle. In all my varied life, I have never been in a more confusing place. Nothing seemed to add up, and I put it down to my lack of spiritual attainment. It's true I didn't have much of the latter, but that wasn't the confusion. It was that the whole place was a nest of lies and delusions. That came out later.
The amazing and hopeful part of the story is not really stressed in the book. And that is, Zen Center is alive and well. They took a situation which has destroyed many spiritual practice centers, and they survived and learned. That is a tribute to the deep moral and spiritual treasure of the committed students which are still there. If it wasn't for them, no one would bother to tell that old story.

37 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars the trees for the forest, November 1, 2001

By 

Reed Malcolm (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Hardcover)

The publishers of this of this book would probably like prospective readers to think that it's a story about sex, greed, and...well...more sex. It's not. Shoes Outside the Door is more like reading about a couple's messy divorce. Who's wrong and who's right depends on who you talk to, while no one is completely free of blame. But like most failed marriages, sex, money and inexperience are at the root of the break up---a split that would topple a Zen community and become legendary on the gossip circuit.

San Francisco Zen Center was established in the early 1960's by Shunryu Suzuki-roshi (author of the classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind) and a group of American-born students hungry for the teachings of Buddhism. Within two decades SFZC would grow from a small handful of students, artists, and house wives to a virtual Zen serfdom. Operations included two large practice centers, a mountain monastery (which doubled as a guest resort), real estate, plus various businesses including a 5-star vegetarian restaurant, a bakery, and a clothing store. This growth explosion can largely be attributed to vision of one Richard Baker--the Harvard educated, dharma heir to Suzuki-roshi (who died in 1971), and arguably the most charismatic, smart, and ambitious of Suzuki's core students.

Baker had an uncanny ability to rally the troops. His passion for Zen was contagious, and so was his dream of building an extended Zen empire. Few could resist falling in line with his grand plans (plans Suzuki himself was not entirely keen on). In time SFZC would become the hang out for rock stars, politicians, writers, and other luminaries. The only problem was it was Baker who was doing most of the hanging out while others put in long hours of unpaid labor ("work practice"). Thus would spark resentment and lay the foundation for Baker's eventual dethronement on more salacious charges.

The book's title is reference to a 1983 retreat at Tassajara when the shoes of Baker's best friend's wife were spotted outside his cabin door for a few days running, thereby exposing what turned out to be not the first of similar relationships between the married abbot and his students. The affair seemed scandalous to everyone but Baker, and would set off an avalanche of accusations, anger, and resentment that linger to this day. In the end Baker would reluctantly resign the abbotship, while half of his students would painfully reject their teacher and leave the institution in which they had invested their lives. Those who stayed behind were left with a sea of debt and a number of failing business ventures.  

Downing is a skilled and talented writer. His ability to piece together the many strands of this complicated story is remarkable, especially when one considers he knew next to nothing about Buddhism before taking on the task. What makes the book even more amazing is the fact that it was commissioned with the blessing and assistance of the community itself, who felt it important to open their doors and air their dirty linen. Six of the seven former or current abbots and scores of long-time students sat down with the author to tell their version of what one abbess wryly refers to as "the Apocalypse." But chronicling real life events can be like trying to untangle a ball of fishing line. There are so many disjointed events, conflicting recollections, and subjective interpretations of the Baker calamity that reading Shoes Outside the Door can seem like treading through a field of land mines. This isn't the story of a war-it's the story of its many battles. In the end the reader is left with no sense of resolution, just a severe case of battle fatigue.

Some would argue that it's too soon for a book like this to come out. The dust hasn't finished settling. This may be true. But there are lessons to be gleamed from what's happened so far. Though it was brought to its knees by the Baker affair, SFZC eventually managed to stand up and dust itself off. (Many thought it never would). To this day it remains an unprecedented experiment in American Buddhism. And while it still walks with a residual limp, SFZC has chosen to swallow its pride and share its hard knocks so other Buddhist communities can avoid making similar mistakes. For this we should all bow deeply in gasho.

39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oral History of a Crisis in Zen, April 7, 2002

By 

Charles Vekert "Chuck Vekert" (Highland, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center (Hardcover)

Buddhism is here to stay, and this book will have historical importance. It recounts the crisis that nearly destroyed the first Buddhist monastery ever built outside of Asia, in the 2,300 year history of that religion, after the death of its founder, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. I hope that the author will put his notes and taped interviews in some university library, since historians of religion will want to consult them in the coming centuries. Wouldn't scholars love to have first person accounts of the disputes mentioned in Acts of the Apostles between Peter and Paul about admitting gentiles to the Christian community?

When I first began to read about Buddhism in the early 70's, I thought that a Zen master was a type of saint. He or she could make mistakes, but was infinitely compassionate, above fleshy desires, and as enlightened as the Buddha. But facts in the last thirty years show that Zen masters (and teachers in other traditions) can be insensitive to others' needs, have plenty of desire, and have (so far as one can judge) less than perfect understanding. One can pass many koans or receive transmission from a certified Zen master and still be a jerk--or worse. This book documents the rise and fall of one such man, Richard Baker, the handpicked successor to Suzuki Roshi.

Baker, although married, had affairs with female students, ignored the monastic community to hobnob with the rich and famous, and started zen related businesses that, instead of providing money for the zen community, turned into money and time sponges only profitable because the monks provided practically free labor. People were working so hard in the businesses that they had little time or energy for meditation. Finally, Baker had one affair too many and people realized that they were slaving to provide him with a nice BMW, three houses, and a great lifestyle. He was asked to resign and the members of the community, after some initial floundering, hired management consultants, sold the businesses, and put limits on the power of future leaders. The men and women of the zen community deserve great credit for preserving Suzuki Roshi's legacy this crisis could have destroyed it.

Another lesson of this book and others such as After Zen by Janwillem van de Wetering or Ambivalent Zen by Lawrence Shainberg is that spiritual wisdom and worldly wisdom (or practical common sense) are not the same. The virtues of Mother Teresa and Abraham Lincoln seldom occur in the same person. Even if Baker was a complete opportunist taking a sweet deal for all it was worth, he should have realized that he was living to high on the hog for it to last.

This book should be read by any Westerner who has or is thinking of attaching himself to a Buddhist teacher, or for that matter, any type of guru. The book teaches that faith in a teacher must be provisional and that you must not surrender your own judgment. Reason is our greatest gift from God, and we must never fail to use it. The Buddha himself said that we should believe not because he said something but because we find it true in our own lives and practice and to work out our salvation with diligence. Don't forget that.