Zen Profiles

  • Lou Nordstrom

    “Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer” I have not interviewed Lou Nordstrom. This profile is gleaned, in part, from his book, Memoirs of an American Zen Pioneer.[1] My only communication with him was through a student who replied to my request to quote material from that book. The student wrote back: “Lou says of course…

  • Stephen Zenki Salad

    American Zen Facebook Page Zenki Salad has cycled through a number of careers. He was a New York cab driver, he was a teacher of the deaf, he taught English in Japan, he held a number of adminstrative posts both in hospitals – including the Cedars-Sinai hospital in Los Angeles – and with the enterntainment…

  • Sheng Yen

    Conversations with Rebecca Li Rebecca Li is a second-generation Dharma heir of Chan Master Sheng Yen, whose Dharma Drum Foundation now has affiliate centers in fourteen countries. “The first time I met Master Shen Yen in person,” she tells me, “was when I was in grad school, and he visited Los Angeles. It was very…

  • 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…