Zen Profiles

  • Martine Taikai Palmiter

    Joyful Mind Zen Community, Rockville, Maryland There are factions in the US currently resisting the concept of political “wokeness,” in the sense of being “awakened” to racial or gender injustices inherent in societal structures. But for Martine Palmiter spiritual and the political “awakening” are intertwined.  “I was raised American Baptist, and I actually loved going…

  • Joan Halifax

    Upaya Zen Center – I have a spiel I use before starting an interview. I assure the person interviewed that I am less interested in what they say than in what they intended to say and that I recognize there may be a difference between the two. Therefore, I will send them a transcript of…

  • Sara Jisho Siebert

    Zen Fields, Ames, Iowa –  Sara Jisho Siebert is a Soto Zen priest who teaches at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa. Her back story is striking. “When I was fourteen, a number of people in my life experienced sexual violence and talked to me about it. My mom is a great listener, and I guess…

  • Thomas Hand

    Abridged from Catholicism and Zen – In addition to the Soto missions established for the benefit of the immigrant populations on the West Coast, and the Asian-trained teachers who sought to introduce a new spiritual tradition to the West, there was a third route by which Zen came to North America: Catholic missionaries who returned…

  • 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…