Ruth Fuller Sasaki

Who was Ruth Fuller Sasaki?

Ruth Fuller Sasaki, born Ruth Fuller, was an important figure in the development of Buddhism in the United States. As Ruth Fuller Everett, she met and studied with Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki in Japan in 1930. In 1938, she became a principal supporter of the Buddhist Society of America, in New York. She married Sokei-an, the Zen priest in residence there, in 1944, but he died within a year. In 1949, she went to Kyoto to find another roshi to live and teach in New York, to complete translations of key Zen texts, and to pursue her own Zen training, receiving sanzen from Gotō Zuigan.

She stayed in Kyoto for most of the rest of her life, becoming in 1958 the first foreigner to be a priest of a Rinzai Zen temple, and the only westerner, and the only woman, yet to be a priest of a Daitoku-ji temple. She was careful to record, however, that she did not perform the usual duties of a priest, "because I was a foreigner, a woman, untrained in temple procedures, and because I needed the years left me to carry on the work of spreading Zen to the west."

Sasaki was instrumental in the translations into English of many Zen texts. One of the most important was Zen dust; the history of the koan and koan study in Rinzai Zen, published in 1966 by her own First Zen Institute. In 2006, Snyder wrote, "Her writings from the sixties were ahead of their time and remain accurate and relevant."