Soyen Shaku
Here Nyogen came to meet another 20th-century pioneer of Zen, D.T. Suzuki. Suzuki was a lay student of Soyen Shaku. Nyogen was becoming disconcerted with the institutional practices of the monastery at the time, and turned to books as a means of release. Here he came across the works of Friedrich Fröbel, the founder of kindergarten. In 1901, Nyogen asked Soyen if he could leave the monastery to open a kindergarten. He called it Mentorgarten, a place free of religiosity and ritual where children could be children.