A White Tea Bowl

Mitsu Suzuki is the widow of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the Zen monk who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States. A White Tea Bowl is a selection of her poems, written after her return to Japan in 1993. These 100 haiku were chosen by editor Kazuaki Tanahashi and translated by Zen teacher Kate McCandless to celebrate Mitsu’s 100th birthday on April 27, 2014. The introduction by Zen poet and priest Norman Fischer describes with loving detail a meeting with Mitsu at Rinso-in temple in 2010, considers the formative impact of war in Japan and social upheaval in America on her life, and places her poetry in the evolution of haiku as an international form.