Thank You and Ok!

David Chadwick began his Zen study under the legendary Japanese master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1966. Much later, Suzuki Roshi’s successor said of Chadwick: “Years of expensive Zen training gone to waste.”

In 1988 Chadwick flew to Japan to begin a four-year period of voluntary exile and remedial education. In THANK YOU AND OK! he recounts his experiences both inside and outside the monastery and offers insightful portraits of the characters he encountered—the bickering monks, the patient abbot, the ominous insects, the bewildered bureaucrats, and his idiosyncratic fellow students--as they worked inexorably toward initiating him into the mysterious ways of Japan.

This book will be of interest to those studying Zen Buddhism, Japan, or the workings of human nature.

Praise for THANK YOU AND OK!

"Hats off to Chadwick. . . . His writer’s skill is evident in everything from skin-crawling descriptions of mukade (dreaded scorpion-like insects) to a benevolent look at takuhatsu, formal monks’ begging.”
--PUBLISHERS WEEKLY