Guide to cuke.com --- History of Cuke Archiving  --- cuke home page for brief history of cuke and our other sites

Overview of Cuke Archive
by DC
written for the Winter Membership Newsletter from San Francisco Zen Center, Feb. 2018

Dear fellow comrades of the way,

 

We invite you to visit Cuke Archives and snoop around. The aim of cuke archives is to preserve and make available as much as we can gather of the words Shunryu Suzuki spoke and wrote and the images, stories, and memories of him and those whose paths crossed his. Here's where this archive resides:

 

  • cuke.com - the oral/written history - interviews, comments, publications/bibliography, stories, sangha news, photos, calligraphy and letters, history, the Wind Bells in whole and parts, the 25 Year Book, and much more
  • shunryusuzuki.com - all the transcripts we can find - verbatim and edited, audio original and enhanced, video in whole and parts, photos.
  • zmbm.net - for Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind - original lectures the book came from, early drafts, comments, history
  • cukenew.blogspot.co.id - cuke.com's What's New with daily Suzuki lecture excerpts and other posts
  • Facebook Cuke Archives - Zen posts automatically uploaded from the blog
  • Yout Tube Cuke Video - all the film/video in whole and divided up - same as on shunryusuzuki.com
  • On numerous storage devices that captured this evolving compilation at various points in time.

 

Cuke.com began in December of 1998 as a supplement to the book, Crooked Cucumber: the Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki. It had a few sections - About the Author, Reviews, Photos, then Reader's Comments and Errata. Now it has the whole book with notes. Started posting interviews and other stories about Suzuki Roshi and those whose paths crossed his. There was a Tassajara fire in '99 and posted daily about it in Sangha News. It kept growing with new sections and material in a haphazard fashion. The What's New pages go back to mid '99 and leave the tracks of the posts. In 2008 shunryusuzuki.com was created to house and make available the systematic archive of Shunryu Suzuki lecture transcripts and audio, video, and photos.  In 2010 Peter Ford, a tech-savvy Buddhist in Tennessee, started helping out and greatly upgraded shunryusuzuki.com and now cuke.com. In 2015 What's New moved to the Cuke New Blog. YouTube Cuke Video followed. In November 2017 a menu and dropdown format was created for cuke.com originally for fifty key pages and any new pages. ZMBM.net for the book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind is our third Zen site though it's basically a menu for what's available in the zmbm section of cuke.com.

 

This vast collection is the work of many motivated individuals going back to the early 1960s. A great deal about the history of this archiving is on cuke.com and gets periodic updates but it's always incomplete. The same can be said about these sites in general. The material is constantly being added to, upgraded, corrected, though it's always incomplete and in need of fixing here and there. Cuke Archives is one of many ways in which the legacy of Shunryu Suzuki is being preserved, but not only his, also that of those who were there and many who came after without whom there would be no legacy. The intent is not to present polished material carefully selected, but to preserve and make available as complete a presentation of the material as possible.

 

We hope you enjoy your visit to Cuke Archives while it lasts. We're aware that everything will eventually disappear and that even the most extreme attempts at preservation ultimately come to naught. We keep in mind the admonition of Philip Whalen who, once when I was bemoaning the great loss of life, art, and library of Nalanda over 800 years ago, responded with a slightly exasperated sigh, "Oh David, just enough survives."

 

David Chadwick
Bali, Indonesia
January 12, 2018