As a youth, Senzaki's grandmother told him he had been abandoned as an infant and was discovered by a fisherman from Sakhalin island, Siberia who reportedly brought him back to Aomori Prefecture.
Aizo's grandmother was perhaps misinformed in her version of events, because some accounts state young Senzaki was adopted by a travelling Kegon Buddhist priest and brought back to Japan.
The elderly priest had a profound influence on him, which was, as Nyogen Senzaki later wrote, "to live up to the Buddhist ideals outside of name and fame and to avoid as far as possible the world of loss and gain".
He felt himself drawn a bit to Christianity,[8] during this period, but ended up meeting a haiku poet who taught him about Matsuo Bashō.
On April 8, 1895 (on Vesak), when Aizo was 19, he was ordained as a monk and was given the Dharma name Nyogen at a Soto Zen temple.
The next year Nyogen went to Kamakura to Engaku-ji where he studied Zen under Rinzai master Soyen Shaku.
During this time Nyogen contracted tuberculosis and lived in virtual confinement in a small hut on the grounds of the monastery.
Nyogen was becoming disconcerted with the institutional practices of the monastery at the time, and turned to books as a means of release.
In 1905 Soyen Shaku was asked by friends in the San Francisco, CA area to come and give talks and lectures on Buddhism.
Nyogen stayed in the USA for the rest of his life, with the exception of a trip in 1955 back to Japan to visit his friend Soen Nakagawa.
During his spare time Nyogen would visit the San Francisco Public Library often and read books on Immanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James.
Nyogen moved to Los Angeles in the 1930s, where he again rented out an apartment and continued the so-called "floating zendo" model.
It was Mrs. Tanahashi who introduced Nyogen to the haiku poetry of Soen Nakagawa, an unconventional young monk practicing in Japan, who would go on to become one of the most prominent Rinzai Zen teachers to come West.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the signing of Executive Order 9066, Senzaki was among the tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans to be relocated to internment camps.