History of the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi Archive Preservation Efforts

 

Here’s a bit of background on the past efforts and great care for these recordings which have made this present collection possible.

Suzuki Roshi likely gave over 1000 talks in the twelve years between arriving in the US in 1959 and his death in 1971.

  • For approximately 450 of these talks, audio recordings and/or written notes were made.
  • Starting in December of 1961, written summaries of the talks were published in Zen Center's Wind Bell magazine, covering a small fraction of what he said.
  • From July 1965 onwards, people started recording some of his talks onto open reel tapes, and subsequently cassettes.
  • Many of these talks were recorded over at the time, to re-use the tape after they had been transcribed.

Starting in 1976, under Abbot Richard Baker, cataloging and copying of the audio archive was initiated.

  • Rick Levine first led this effort, adding beautiful calligraphy labeling to some of the tapes.
  • Then in 1976 Michael Katz came from Lindisfarne Institute on Long Island where he was their AV manager, and archived a number of older talks onto improved reel-to-reel tape.

In the late 1990s, a project managed by Bill Redican (working under Michael Wenger) created a nearly complete set of 10” master reels, to protect and preserve the recordings on a professional format. Audio engineering work was done by Mark Watts.

  • A set of low-resolution reference cassette tapes was also made at this time, and were frequently listened to by visitors at Zen Center’s library locations.
  • A backup set of archival cassettes were also made using thicker, more durable cassette tape, and stored separately.

In 2006, a selection of 41 talks were transferred from the cassettes to CD’s by Jean Selkirk and Celeste West

  • The collection was titled “Nothing Special,” and copies were shared with several of the Branching Streams zen centers around the country.
  • The audio quality was not great, but this was the first time most people had a chance to hear the voice of Zen Center’s founding teacher.

In 2008, David Chadwick compiled and digitized all the known audio recordings, with the support of Steve Stucky, Lew Richmond, Ed Sattizahn, and Michael Wenger.

  • This was called the Shunryu Suzuki Legacy Project.
  • Recordings were gathered from the “Nothing Special” CD set, and the master reference cassettes.
  • Copies of this collection were shared with a handful of organizations that had contributed to support the work.

In 2012, Charlie Wilson founded an audio archival company called Engage Wisdom, with the aim of preserving and sharing the audio archive of his teacher, Tenshin Reb Anderson, and eventually offering this technology to Zen Centers and audio archives around the world.

  • Shundo David Haye joined Engage Wisdom in 2016, bringing his audio engineering experience from the BBC, plus his Zen Center background as an ordained Priest and former City Center Director.

In 2014, through the support of Cuke Archives (David Chadwick), Engage Wisdom digitized 271 Suzuki Roshi reel-to-reel masters that had been created by Mark Watts.

  • These second-generation master tapes represented the best surviving audio quality available, as the original tapes from the 60’s were degrading rapidly.
  • This work added eight new talks to the audio archive.
  • We improved audibility for all the talks through our audio remastering software, and enabled previously inaudible talks to be listened to and transcribed through noise-reduction and speed corrections.
  • This amounted to 280 talks digitized at archival quality

In 2016, Engage Wisdom gathered all known tapes from the various Zen Center libraries and offices, moved these to climate-controlled storage to stabilize and gradually reduce the humidity levels of the magnetic tapes which were aging heavily in the Bay Area’s foggy climate.

  • The total count was approximately 11,000 tapes at that point, and many boxes of tapes continue to come out of the woodwork each year, as they are discovered in offices, or retrieved from homes where they had been stashed for safe keeping.
  • Through the support of several individual teachers and communities, several hundreds of these tapes have already been successfully digitized by Engage Wisdom, including the collections of Reb Anderson, Mel Weitsman, Edward Brown, Shohaku Okumura, Katagiri Roshi, Richard Baker, and others.

In 2018, Engage Wisdom photographed the complete Zen Center archive of cassettes and reels in preparation for digitization.

  • Of these, we examined 206 reels and 867 cassettes attributed to Suzuki Roshi (some including the voices of other teachers in that time period, including Kobun Chino, Tatsugami Roshi and Katagiri Roshi).
  • These reels and cassettes are a mixture of original recordings made at Sokoji, City Center and Tassajara, as well as different generations of duplication masters and copies made over subsequent decades.
  • We examined the photographs to identify which recordings might yield new audio talks, because they referred to new dates, and all examples where the dates were unclear.

In 2019, Engage Wisdom digitized all potentially uncaptured recordings identified from these photographs, in an effort to recover any and all possible “lost” recordings of Suzuki Roshi.

  • 56 of these were cassettes
  • 64 of these were reels.
  • This work yielded 27 new audio tracks - an increase of close to 10% on the existing archive

In 2020, the best versions of every existing recording were gathered and processed through Engage Wisdom’s latest noise-reduction tools, to compile the complete, definitive Suzuki Roshi collection.

  • These 315 clarified recordings will be shared with the Zen Center community worldwide this year, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
  • Approximately 7000 cassettes of Zen Center’s other Abbots, teachers and visiting scholars remain in the archive, awaiting funding for digitization and processing.

In 2021, 72 previously imported tapes were re-digitized by Engage Wisdom with the aim of improving audio quality and searching for any parts of the tapes that were not previously imported.

  • This yielded 3 additional previously unheard talks, bringing the new total to 30 new talks added to the archive.
  • Audio quality of 95 talks was improved and clarified to support ongoing transcription efforts.

According to the Cuke Archives blog:
The new Shunryu Suzuki lecture site that Charlie had been creating is Engage Wisdom. It's “engaged” because select people can edit. Whereas Cuke Archives has always focused on Shunryu Suzuki, this site is an archive for all SFZC audio and like shunryusuzuki.com it has a sophisticated search function. The EW Suzuki Roshi Audio Archive presents Charlie Wilson's enhanced audio, the best, with the verbatim or closest to verbatim version of the transcript. It's very easy to use and well presented. Shunryusuzuki.com has every version of audio and transcript we could find including a lot of extraneous matter like the chants from the lecture tapes and fragments of talks and quotes from Suzuki from the Wind Bells. And all his extant letters and calligraphy and doodles.

These notes have been compiled and edited for accuracy by Charlie Wilson, David Chadwick, Peter Ford, Shundo David Haye, and others.