Zen lineage charts interest from beat poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. The most successful implementation of Zen-practice was brought about by Shunryu Suzuki, Hakuun Yasutani, and Yasutani's student Taizan Maezumi. Shunryu Suzuki (鈴木 俊隆 "Suzuki Shunryū", dharma name "Shōgaku Shunryū" 祥岳俊隆, often called Suzuki Roshi) (born May 18, 1904, Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan; died December 4, 1971 in San Francisco, CA, USA) was a Sōtō Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States, and is renowned for founding the first Buddhist monastery outside Asia (Tassajara Zen Mountain Center). Suzuki founded San Francisco Zen
Zen scriptures "are expected to become familiar with the classics of the Zen canon". A review of the early historical documents and literature of early Zen masters clearly reveals that they were well versed in numerous Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras. Nevertheless, Zen is often pictured as anti-intellectual. This picture of Zen emerged during the Song Dynasty (960–1297), when Chán became the dominant form of Buddhism in China, and gained great popularity among the educated and literary classes of Chinese society. The use of koans, which are highly stylized literary texts, reflects this popularity among the higher classes. In the tenth century, during the