Conversations with North American Zen Teachers
Bodhin Kjolhede
Rochester Zen Center – At one point in the course of our Zoom conversation, Bodhin Kjolhede has to get up from his desk and leave the room. As he comes back, I notice he is wearing a t-shirt with the Latin phrase: Ego Sum Abbas. “My students give me a lot of gag gifts,” he…
Philip Whalen
Adapted from The Third Step East – For many people in the 1950s and early ’60s, their first encounter with Zen came not from reading Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen or Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginners Mind but rather from reading Jack Kerouac’s 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums. By the 1940s, information about Zen…
John Tarrant
Pacific Zen Institute – I first interviewed John Tarrant at his home in Santa Rosa in 2013. His was the third interview I conducted in this project, and I was still finding my way as an interviewer. I did a second interview with him last November; it was my 289th. He is Australian and grew…
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Richard Bryan McDaniel 