Zen Profiles

  • Nelson Foster

    Ring of Bone Zendo and East Rock Sangha Nelson Foster begins our conversation by telling me, bluntly: “As I’ve said to you before – fair warning – I really think this is a story of Zen communities and organizations, sanghas. Teachers come and go, but the Dharma stays with the Sangha. I see a focus…

  • Richard Baker

    Dharma Sangha Centers –   “There was a psychic at Tassajara that I visited with my best friend, Bob, and my sister,” David Chadwick tells me. David is Shunryu Suzuki’s biographer and chronicler of the San Francisco Zen Center. “He was a very powerful psychic, and we’d each gotten readings which were kind of cool.…

  • David Parks

    Bluegrass Zen – I was a member of an amateur bluegrass group while in university, so am charmed by the idea that there is Bluegrass Zen community in Lexington, Kentucky. It’s resident teacher, David Parks, was born in Phoenix, Arizona but grew up in Kentucky. “When I was born, my father was a doctor with…

  • Guy Gaudry

    London, Ontario, Zen Center – Guy Gaudry is the director of the London Zen Center in Ontario. He grew up in a small town in British Columbia – Hope – where he was introduced to Buddhism in a pharmacy. “In Hope, our only source of information was the local drug store. It was a very…

  • Tess Beasley

    Pacific Zen Institute – Tess Beasley, although located in Connecticut on the East Coast, is the current board president of the Pacific Zen Institute on the West. And she grew up far from either ocean in Utah. “Neither of my parents were Mormon. They ended up there by just strange karmic circumstances and decided to…

  • Joko Beck

    A conversation with Peg Syverson – Joko Beck died in 2011, before I began doing these interviews. I never met her but have spoken with several people who knew her. Peg Syverson was one of the most informative of these. Joko was the founder of the Ordinary Mind School of Zen and became one of…