It was on the 9th of July, in 1969, that Gertrude Dixon, Trudy to her friends, died.
While not widely known outside her San Francisco Zen center community, she is in fact one of the truly important figures in helping to shape the beginnings of Zen Buddhism’s interest among the larger North American English speaking community.
And Trudy deserves to be known more broadly.
She’s part of a group of people who did something kind of wonderful. It really starts in 1965, when Marian Derby began recording Shunryu Suzuki’s lectures in Los Altos. Marian then took the tapes and started transcribing them. Consulting with the roshi at numerous points (who often commented, “Did I say that?”) she compiled a manuscript.
That manuscript ended up in Richard Baker’s hands. At the time Dick, as he was mainly known then, later, Baker Roshi, was Suzuki Roshi’s right hand. Dick assumed responsibility for the manuscript. It sat there for a while, until in 1968 gave it to Trudy Dixon.
Trudy had previously edited some of Suzuki Roshi’s talks for the center’s newsletter, Wind Bell. She was a also a close student of the Rosh.
Commenting on this in his biography of Suzuki Roshi, Crooked Cucumber, David Chadwick noted “Trudy took on the task even though she had two small children, had undergone surgery for breast cancer, and was in poor health.”
She re-listened to the original tapes, took the mess of materials, and began to organize it all. During this process she consulted regularly both with Dick and the roshi.
Even as she was moving toward death, she didn’t let up. Finally, Trudy completed her work and handed it on to Dick, who took the manuscript with him to Japan for minor editing.
Then Trudy Goodman died.
When the book, now titled Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, came out the following year, as David Chadwick said, the roshi “looked at the book, which reflected his teaching through the work of Marian Derby, Richard Baker, and Trudy Dixon.
After a moment he moved up next to me (Chadwick) and chuckled. ‘Good book,’ he said, thumping the cover with an index finger. ‘I didn’t write it, but it looks like a good book.’”
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is now widely considered the first genuine classic of North American Zen…
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