Green Gulch was founded in 1972 by the San Francisco Zen Center and Zentatsu Richard Baker, in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, the Japanese priest whose book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind became one of the most influential texts in American Buddhism. Suzuki had established the San Francisco Zen Center in the 1960s and its mountain retreat at Tassajara in the Los Padres wilderness. Green Gulch became the third point in a triangle of practice centers -- urban, mountain, and coastal farm -- each offering a different relationship between meditation and daily life. At Green Gulch, the relationship is agricultural: residents grow food, tend gardens, and practice zazen, treating the work as inseparable from the sitting.

The organic farm at Green Gulch supplies vegetables and flowers to the San Francisco Zen Center's other locations and to local farmers' markets. The gardens are meticulously maintained, with rows of lettuces, kale, and herbs running in parallel lines that have a meditative geometry of their own. Apprentices in the farm and garden program learn both organic farming techniques and Zen practice, working alongside long-term residents who may have been at Green Gulch for decades. The integration of manual labor and contemplative practice follows a tradition that reaches back to the earliest Zen monasteries in China, where the founding masters insisted that monks grow their own food rather than relying on alms.

Unlike some monastic communities, Green Gulch welcomes visitors. The public is invited to Sunday morning programs, which include meditation instruction and a dharma talk, followed by a walk through the gardens. The center offers workshops, retreats, and conferences throughout the year. The coastal setting -- the valley opens directly onto Muir Beach, and trails connect to the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais State Park -- makes Green Gulch a destination for hikers and beachgoers as well as practitioners. The contrast between the silence of the meditation hall and the crash of Pacific surf a quarter-mile away defines the place. Green Gulch exists at the edge of things: the edge of the continent, the edge of the city, the edge of what is cultivated and what is wild.