Zentatsu Richard Baker

Zentatsu Richard Baker (born 1936) is an American Sōtō teacher and the only American Dharma heir of Shunryū Suzuki, having received transmission on 8 December 1970 and the Mountain Seat ceremony at San Francisco Zen Center on 21 November 1971 just before Suzuki's death^[1]. He succeeded Suzuki as abbot of SFZC and led the institution's rapid 1970s expansion (the founding of Greens restaurant, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center programme, the City Center on Page Street). His tenure ended in a 1983 institutional crisis documented in Michael Downing's *Shoes Outside the Door*; following the resignation he founded Dharma Sangha and the Crestone Mountain Zen Center (Colorado) and Johanneshof in the Black Forest of Germany, where he continues to teach^[1][2].