Rick Fields

A historian of Buddhism in the West and a poet and journalist, Rick Fields was born in Queens, in New York City, in 1942. In New York City, he encountered Zen and met Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets before moving to California, where he studied at the Zen Centers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the early 1970s, he became interested in Tibetan Buddhism, and in 1973 became a student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. His first work as a journalist was for the Whole Earth Catalog in 1969. Later, he was the editor of both Yoga Journaland Vajradhatu Sun, which became Shambhala Sun, and a contributing editor of Tricycle and New Age Journal. His books include How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (1991), and Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters, written with Bernie Glassman (1996). His last book, Fuck You, Cancer and Other Poems (1997) dealt with his experience with lung cancer. He died at home in Fairfax, California, in 1999. He was 57.