Sylvia Boorstein
is a well-known teacher in the Insight Meditation movement. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York in a strongly Jewish home, but later drifted away from a sense of Jewish religious identity. She graduated from Barnard College, received a Master’s of Social Work from the University of California at Berkeley, and later earned a Ph.D. in psychology from the Saybrook Institute. She practiced psychotherapy for a number of years before beginning to study vipassana meditation in the mid- to late 1970s. By the mid-1980s, she was a senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She later cofounded Spirit Rock Meditation Center outside San Francisco. She is probably best known for her popular presentation of Buddhism in Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There: A Mindfulness Meditation Manual and It’s Easier Than You Think: The Buddhist Way to Happiness.
Boorstein is a pioneer in dealing with the complex questions of interreligious dialogue and of dual religious identity, both of which are important issues in the adaptation of Buddhism to the United States. In the 1980s, she was a representative of American Buddhism in a Buddhist-Christian dialogue at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. She was among the western Buddhist teachers who met with the Dalai Lama in 1993 to discuss the challenge of transmitting the dharma to the West. However, she is also among the American dharma teachers who have most directly addressed the combination of Jewish and Buddhist religious commitments and identities, which she explores in her book, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist: On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist.
Boorstein now thinks of herself as a devout Jew and Buddhist; she continues to teach Buddhist meditation and to practice psychotherapy. Over the course of the 1990s, she also became a well-known figure in the Jewish renewal movement. She served as a panelist with other noted Jewish spiritual leaders at the “Jew in the Lotus” conference in Philadelphia in 1995, which was an outgrowth of a meeting between Jewish leaders and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala in 1990. She is on the Advisory Board of Chochmat HaLev, a San Francisco Bay area meditation and spirituality training center, and on the faculty at Elat Chayyim, a family-based Jewish education center in the Catskill Mountains of New York State.
Chogyam Trungpa,
a Kagyu lama and rinpoche, was among the first major wave of Tibetan teachers to work in the West. He was head of the Surmang monasteries in eastern Tibet until the age of twenty, when he fled his homeland. He then served at the Young Lamas Home in Dalhousie, India, but moved to England in 1963 to study comparative religion at Oxford University. In 1967, he relocated to Scotland where he founded Samye Ling, among the first Tibetan Buddhist practice centers in the West. Shortly thereafter, he gave up his monastic vows, married, and moved to the United States, where he emerged as one of the most brilliant and popular teachers working in and around the countercultural movements of the 1960s. The first center he established in the United States was Tail of the Tiger in Barnet, Vermont, now known as Karme Choling.
During the 1970s, Chogyam Trungpa relocated to Boulder, Colorado, where he founded Vajradhatu, an organization that served for a time as an umbrella organization for his many teaching activities. He also gained a reputation for his ability to present the essence of traditional Buddhist teachings in a way that addressed the needs and aspirations of western students. To this end, he developed a path of contemplative study and practice called Shambhala Training. During the 1980s, he continued to develop his unique teaching style, drawing inspiration from other forms of Buddhism, particularly Zen, and from the arts and psychotherapy. During these years, the organization he founded flourished, with some hundred city-based meditation centers, several rural retreats, and a Buddhist monastery on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, which is now called Gampo Abbey. In 1986, he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he reestablished his headquarters. He died the following year and was cremated at Karme Choling in Vermont.
After a period of turmoil after his death, Trungpa’s eldest son, Osel Rangdrol Mukpo, took over the leadership of the movement, which he reorganized into a cluster of organizations collectively called Shambhala International. These now include Gampo Abbey; several different teaching lineages; a range of centers in Canada, the United States, and Europe; Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado; and Rocky Mountain Shambhala Center, an international retreat center about two hours from Boulder. Under the direction of his son, now known as Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, Chogyam Trungpa’s unique combination of traditionalism and innovation continues as a major influence in the American Buddhist community.
Ruth Denison
is among the pioneers who introduced vipassana meditation into the United States. She was born in a village in eastern Germany and raised a Christian. As a child, she had a strong mystical streak; she recalls being influenced by the life of Theresa of Avila, a Catholic mystic, as a teen. Prior to World War II, Denison was an elementary school teacher. With the defeat of Germany and the ensuing chaos, she lost track of her family and was incarcerated for a time in a forced labor camp run by the Russian occupying forces. During this harrowing period, her religious beliefs remained a source of solace.
After her escape, she secured a teaching position in West Berlin and then immigrated to the United States, where she settled in Los Angeles, began to attend college, and in 1958 met her future husband. Before their marriage, he had been a monk in the Vedanta Society, a well-established Hindu group in the United States, and traveled in circles that included Alan Watts, the psychologist Fritz Perls, and others in what was then the spiritual avant-garde. Through them, Denison was introduced to Asian religions.
In 1960, she and her husband traveled to Asia to study meditation. They spent time in Zen monasteries in Japan, but eventually went to Burma where they practiced at a center of Mahasi Sayadaw, where Denison was first exposed to vipassana meditation. They then moved on to study for three months with U Ba Khin, who became Denison’s teacher. Once back in Los Angeles, she took up Zen practice because at that time there were no vipassana teachers in America, but continued to return to Burma to study with U Ba Khin, who eventually gave her permission to teach. In the early 1970s, Denison began to lead retreats in Europe and the United States, developing vipassana-based techniques that incorporate various psychological approaches to meditation. In 1977, she purchased a cabin in the desert near Joshua Tree, California, which would grow into Dhamma Dena, an important vipassana retreat center, in the 1980s. Denison became a teacher at the Insight Meditation Society after its founding in Barre, Massachusetts in 1975. Throughout the 1990s, she was held in high esteem as one of America’s most popular meditation teachers.
Joan Halifax
has followed a path over the last four decades that epitomizes the questing spirit of her generation. She was born in 1942 and raised a Christian. She went to college in New Orleans in the 1960s and became involved in the civil rights movement, then moved to New York where she worked with Alan Lomax, an anthropologist at Columbia University. Several years later, she traveled to Tibet and then Africa, eventually studying the African Dogon people. Upon her return, she married Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist, with whom she explored the use of LSD in therapy for people facing terminal cancer, eventually earning a Ph.D. in medical anthropology. After her marriage with Grof ended, Halifax worked with Joseph Campbell, the popular interpreter of mythology. She then began to study shamanism as practiced by the Huichol Indians in Mexico, while settling in southern California and co-founding the Ojai Foundation, an organization devoted to alternative forms of community and spirituality.
Halifax developed an early interest in Buddhism from reading the works of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, but she formally took refuge only after being introduced to Seung Sahn, the head of the Kwan Um school of Zen. After studying with him for ten years, she received ordination in 1976. In the mid-1980s, she met Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in southern France; she studied with him and was ordained as a teacher in the Tiep Hien order in 1990. In that year she founded the Upaya, a Buddhist center in Santa Fe, where she continues to teach today. Since 1994, Upaya has provided spiritual counseling to the terminally ill; by the end of the 1990s, Halifax was best known in the Buddhist community for her work on death and dying.
Halifax recently became interested in the kind of socially engaged Buddhism taught by Bernard Glassman, founder of the Zen Community of New York. In the late 1990s, when Glassman and his wife, Sandra Jishu Holmes, began the Zen Peacemaker Order, Halifax joined them as a Founding Teacher. She is now a priest and teacher in the Soto Zen tradition. Upaya was renamed the Upaya Peace Institute and is now one of the teaching paths in the Zen Peacemaker Order. Halifax is the author of a number of books, including The Human Encounter With Death, which she wrote with Grof; Shamanic Voices: A Survey of Visionary Narratives; Shaman: The Wounded Healer; and The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth.
Asayo Horibe
is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese American. She was born in the Rohwer Relocation Camp in McGehee, Arkansas, one of the camps where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. She was raised in Michigan and then in the Chicago area, where her parents belonged to the Midwest Buddhist Temple, a Jodo Shinshu temple that is part of the Buddhist Churches of America. For fifty years, however, Horibe has been a member of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago (BTC), an independent institution founded in 1944 by Gyomay M. Kubose, a prominent area Buddhist, and others of Japanese descent. Kubose’s goal was to use elements from Shin, Zen, and other Buddhist traditions to forge a nonsectarian approach to the dharma that would appeal to all Americans.
During her years at the BTC, Horibe has served as Sunday school teacher, youth group adviser, Board member, and Vice President of Public Relations. In 1989, she also became the first President of the Heartland Sangha in Evanston, Illinois where she now lives. The Heartland Sangha is affiliated with the American Buddhist Association, an umbrella group for a number of organizations devoted to disseminating the dharma in the non-sectarian spirit of Gyomay Kubose. In 1994, she co-chaired the Temple’s fiftieth anniversary celebration. She continues to be active in Heartland Sangha today and serves as its secretary.
Horibe has been a member of the Buddhist Council of the Midwest, the largest intra-Buddhist group in the United States, since 1992. Members of the Council represent a wide range of Buddhist schools and national traditions from more than forty-five temples and dharma centers in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. In 1997, she was elected to serve a two-year term as its president. In that capacity, she helps to mediate disputes and misunderstandings and to strengthen relations among different groups. She also works to educate the general public about Buddhism in an effort to correct popular misconceptions. Most recently, she and other Chicagoland Buddhists have been providing dharma-related information to the Illinois State Chaplaincy, an agency that oversees religious ministries in state mental institutions, hospitals, and prisons.
Horibe is also active in the broader interfaith community, having organized symposia on social issues such as interracial and interfaith marriages. She continues to serve the Japanese community in the Japanese American Service Committee and the Japanese American Citizens’ League and is involved in a number of Asian American programs and activities. She is the single mother of three girls and a grandmother of three, and has worked as a Registered Professional Nurse for more than thirty years.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
is a widely read advocate for the therapeutic value of Buddhist meditation in health maintenance and preventive medicine. He graduated from Haverford College with majors in chemistry and comparative literature, and later completed a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During these years, he became involved in the movement to end the Vietnam War and helped found the Union of Concerned Scientists, an association of academics and professionals trying to raise consciousness about environmental issues and the arms race. He was exposed to Buddhism by reading Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen and soon began to practice zazen. Within the next few years, he also explored various forms of Theravada meditation.
In 1976, Kabat-Zinn accepted a postdoctoral fellowship in anatomy at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. As he moved between Buddhist practice and the world of medicine, he began to contemplate the clinical and medical potential of meditation to alleviate pain and stress-related disorders. In 1979, he and several colleagues established the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University Medical Center within its Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine. Since then, well over 7,000 people with chronic medical problems and pain conditions have participated in the clinic’s eight-week training program in mindfulness meditation, which has become a model for others across the country. He and his colleagues also started similar community-based programs for low-income minorities in inner cities. In the mid-1990s, they established the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center to encourage the use of meditation in prisons, schools, corporations, factories, and other settings.
Kabat-Zinn continues to conduct research related to these issues, but has also become a popular public lecturer and workshop leader. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and was featured in the 1993 PBS series Healing and the Mind, hosted by Bill Moyers. He has written a number of books, including Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness and Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. More recently, he published Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, written with his wife, Myla.
Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Patricia Jean Zenn)
has combined an academic career in Asian studies and a life as a fully ordained bhikkhuni in a way that has few parallels among European American Buddhists. Her scholarly work began with her B.A. in Oriental languages at the University of California in 1969. She later received two Master’s degrees from the University of Hawaii, one in Buddhist philosophy, another in the study of Asian religions. In 1993, she began a Ph.D. program, also at the University of Hawaii, in the comparative study of Asian philosophy. Throughout these years, she often pursued her studies abroad, particularly at the Buddhist Institute of Dialectics and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, both in Dharamsala, India. She is fluent in Tibetan and Japanese and has studied Mandarin Chinese, German, Hindi, Pali, and Sanskrit in order to better pursue her studies.
Lekshe was born and raised in southern California, where she was exposed to Buddhism in the bohemian atmosphere of Malibu. She became more deeply involved, however, only while traveling in Asia in the 1960s. In 1977, she received novice ordination from the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyus, in France. Five years later, she was fully ordained as a bhikkhuni in Taiwan and Korea. She has since written widely on issues related to women monastics and the challenges involved in transplanting Asian monastic traditions to the West. In 1987, she helped to found Sakyadhita: International Association of Buddhist Women and has coordinated a series of international conferences devoted to issues of concern to Buddhist women. She has also worked to establish seven Buddhist educational programs for women in remote districts in the Indian Himalayas under the auspices of Jamyang Choling, a nonprofit, nonsectarian organization registered in California.
Karma Lekshe Tsomo’s work with Sakyadhita and her writing are at the forefront of efforts by and for Buddhist women, where issues such as the status of women, the relations between laity and monastics, and the interaction between Asians and European Americans are under a great deal of discussion. Her major publications include Sakyadhita: Daughters of the Buddha, Buddhism Through American Women’s Eyes, and Sisters in Solitude: Two Traditions of Monastic Ethics for Women.
Masao Kodani
is a sansei, a third-generation Japanese American, raised in the Jodo Shinshu tradition of the Buddhist Churches of America. He was born in Los Angeles in 1940 and spent his early childhood years in the internment camp at Poston, Arizona. After the war, he was raised first in East Los Angeles and then in Watts. He received his undergraduate education at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he majored in east Asian studies. Upon completing his bachelor’s degree, he contemplated graduate school on the East Coast, but at the instigation of a BCA priest he entered Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan instead, where he earned a degree in Buddhist studies.
During these years, Kodani decided to enter the BCA priesthood, and he graduated from Ryukoku prepared to start a career in the ministry back in the United States. After traveling throughout Asia for a year, he took a post as a junior minister at Senshin Buddhist temple in Los Angeles in 1968, where he has remained for thirty years. In 1978, he became Senshin’s senior minister. He has been active in Los Angeles-area interreligious affairs, first in the Los Angeles Interreligious Council and more recently in the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California. He has also promoted taiko, a form of Japanese drumming, as an expression of Japanese American cultural identity. Taiko was originally performed during Bon Odori, a traditional BCA dance festival, but in the late 1960s, Senshin took the lead in developing a taiko group that performs year-round on many different occasions, an example soon followed by other area temples.
Like other leaders in the Buddhist Churches of America, Kodani is concerned about developing strategies to ensure the future of the community. He has long been an advocate for progressive change within an institution that has tended to emphasize traditionalism and sectarian orthodoxy. At Senshin temple, he has developed a form of ministry suited to the needs of a congregation spanning three or four generations, balancing the maintenance of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions with a contemporary form of dharma-centered spirituality. Kodani sees the experience of Jodo Shinshu Buddhists in this country as valuable to other Buddhists who have only recently arrived. Newcomers now face many of the challenges the Buddhist Churches of America confronted in adapting the dharma over the course of several generations, but at a time when the pace of adaptation is highly accelerated.
John Daido Loori
is Abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery (ZMM), the founder and leader of the Mountains and Rivers Order (MRO), and the CEO of Dharma Communications. He began to practice Zen meditation in 1968, having served in the navy, worked in the natural products industry, and led arts organizations in New York State. From 1972 to 1976, he studied with Soen Nakagawa and then with Taizan Maezumi, founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He received denkai (priestly transmission) from Maezumi in 1983 and shiho (dharma transmission) from him in 1986. In 1994, he received Dendokyoshi Certification, formal recognition by the Japanese Soto school of his status as a foreign-born Zen master and teacher. In 1997, Loori also received dharma transmission in the Harada-Yasutani and Inzan lineages of Rinzai Zen, making him one of three Western dharma-holders in both the Soto and Rinzai schools. Loori has transmitted the dharma to two students—Bonnie Myotai Treace Sensei in October 1996 and Geoffrey Shugen Arnold Sensei in July 1997.
In ZMM and the MRO, Loori has created institutions highly respected for their careful yet creative adaptation of Asian Buddhism to the American context. In ZMM, he trains and teaches monastics and several thousand lay students through a network of temples, practice centers, and sitting groups both in this country and in New Zealand. As CEO of Dharma Communications, he has established one of the leading vehicles for Buddhist education and outreach in the United States. He is the author of a dozen books related to Zen practice, including well-known titles such as Still Point: A Beginner’s Guide to Zen Meditation and The Eight Gates of Zen: Spiritual Training in an American Zen Monastery. Dharma Communications also produces Mountain Record, a Buddhist quarterly, and Buddhist audio-visual materials.
The social services and arts are major elements of study and practice at ZMM. Community members engage in social work ranging from wilderness preservation to Buddhist prison missions. Loori continues to teach creative photography, based on the traditional Zen arts and aesthetics, at colleges and universities in week-long and month-long workshops. Over the past thirty years, he has exhibited his photography in more than thirty one-person shows and some fifty group shows both in the United States and overseas. His work has been published in Aperture and Time-Life magazines. Loori and Zen Mountain Monastery have been featured by leading media such as ABC Nightly News and Newsweek, Tricycle, and Utne Reader magazines; and in publications and television productions in Russia, Japan, and Korea.
Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi
was a Zen roshi who, along with Shunryu Suzuki, played a key role in the emergence of the Soto tradition as one of the most importance forces in American Buddhism. He was born in Japan in 1931 and ordained as a Soto Zen monk at the age of eleven. He later received degrees in Oriental literature and philosophy from Komazawa University and studied at Sojiji, one of the two main Soto monasteries in Japan. He first received dharma transmission from Hakujun Kuroda in 1955 and later was approved to teach by Koryu Osaka, a lay Rinzai teacher, and Hakuun Yasutani, the founder of the Sanbo Kyodan, or Three Treasures Association, an independent lineage drawing upon both the Rinzai and Soto traditions. Maezumi was thus a dharma successor in three Zen lineages, which served his community well in developing practice styles suited to the United States.
Maezumi came to Los Angeles in 1956 to serve as a priest for the Japanese American community at Zenshuji Temple, the Soto headquarters in the United States. He soon began to teach zazen to Caucasians and other Americans, and in 1967 established the Zen Center of Los Angeles. At about this time, Maezumi married an American woman and began to raise a family. ZCLA eventually became the basis for a network of Soto teachers and practitioners that, with a similar network based at the San Francisco Zen Center, became prominent during the 1980s.
Maezumi established a number of temples in the United States and Europe that are formally registered with Soto Headquarters in Japan. In addition to ZCLA, these include the Zen Community of New York in Yonkers; Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York; Kanzeon Zen Centers of Salt Lake City, Utah and Europe; and Zen Mountain Center in Mountain Center, California. Zen communities are located in Oregon, San Diego, and Mexico City, and there are more than fifty additional groups in Europe and the United States. Maezumi had twelve students who are seen as his successors. They formally incorporated in 1995 into the White Plum Sangha, a loose affiliation of teachers that can be likened to an extended dharma family. The Sangha now includes a second and third generation of teachers and the beginning of a fourth. It is estimated that Maezumi ordained 68 Zen priests and gave the lay Buddhist precepts to more than 500 people before his unexpected death in Tokyo in 1995.
was born in Sri Lanka and entered the monastic order at the age of eleven. He received a B.A. in Pali and Buddhist philosophy at the University of Ceylon. He later attended Columbia University in New York and the University of London, where he earned a Ph.D. in education. For a number of years, he was senior lecturer in the departments of Education and Buddhist Studies at the University of Keliniya in Sri Lanka, before being appointed delegate to the twelfth General Assembly of the United Nations in 1957. He immigrated to the United States in 1980 and helped to found Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara, one of the first Theravada temples to be established in the Buddhist immigrant community in Los Angeles.
Ratanasara has helped found and served in a number of Buddhist and interreligious groups in the Los Angeles area. He cofounded and was vice president of the Interreligious Council of Southern California, an organization that pioneered interfaith dialogue in the region. He has served as president of the Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California, an organization founded in 1980 that sponsors inter-Buddhist celebrations of Vesak and participates in a wide range of interreligious initiatives. Ratanasara later played a key role in the formation of the American Buddhist Congress, which is devoted to fostering inter-Buddhist understanding on a national scale.
Ratanasara has also been president of the College of Buddhist Studies in Los Angeles, which was instituted by the Sangha Council in 1983. It provides opportunities to study Buddhism from a nonsectarian point of view and promotes understanding among different schools and traditions. Ratanasara sees an important role for monastics in the future of American Buddhism, and he has worked with other ordained monks in Los Angeles to further the cause of full ordination for women. In addition to his work in this country, Ratanasara guides four temples in Sri Lanka and recently opened the International Institute of Buddhist Studies at a temple outside Colombo. He is the author of a number of books, most recently The Path to Perfection: A Buddhist Psychological View of Personality, Growth and Development.
Michael Roach
is a fully ordained monk in the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1995, he became the first American to complete the geshe degree, the Tibetan equivalent of a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy, after twenty-two years of study at Sera Mey Monastery in India and in the United States under Khen Rinpoche Geshe Lobsang Tharchin of Howell, New Jersey. Roach is a scholar of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Russian, and has translated and published numerous scholarly works. But he is also a leading popular teacher who gives classes, workshops, and lectures at Buddhist centers across the country. He has been teaching Buddhism to Americans since 1981.
For many years, following his graduation from Princeton University, Roach helped to run the New York operations of an international diamond purchasing firm, a difficult, high-stakes business but one that enabled him to support his various projects related to Tibetan Buddhism. He is now best known as the founder of the Asian Classics Institute, a public Buddhist meditation and education center under the direction of Lobsang Tharchin, in Greenwich Village; Diamond Abbey, a residential community for monks and nuns outside New York; and Godstow Retreat Center in Redding, Connecticut. Roach also plays an active, ongoing role in the restoration of Sera Mey Monastery, a Lhasa-based Gelugpa monastery relocated in south India in the wake of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. At this writing, Geshe Roach and his assistants were preparing for a three-year meditation retreat, scheduled to begin in March 2000.
Roach is highly regarded by scholars for his direction of the Asian Classics Input Project (ACIP). ACIP searches for copies of important and endangered Tibetan- and Sanskrit-language Buddhist manuscripts and inputs them onto computer for publication and distribution. Thus far, some 100,000 manuscript pages of sutras, commentaries, and monastic textbooks have been transcribed from woodblock prints and published in digital form both on the Internet and on CD-ROM. The work of transcription has been largely accomplished by the Sera Mey Computer Center and other input centers, located in monasteries and refugee communities in India, Mongolia, and Russia, where exiled monks, nuns, and laypeople learn new skills for supporting themselves while helping to save the great literary heritage of the Tibetan tradition.
Chia Theng (C.T.) Shen,
a retired shipping executive who lives in New York, is an influential lay Buddhist leader, scholar, and philanthropist. He was born in China in 1913 and received a B.S. in electrical engineering from the National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1937. He began his career in the shipping industry in Shanghai, then moved to Hong Kong before emigrating to the United States in 1949. Once in America, he and his wife, Woo Ju, became deeply involved in the study and practice of Buddhism; over the course of several decades, they have made major contributions to the Chinese American and other Buddhist communities.
The Shens began their philanthropic activity in 1964 with the founding of the Buddhist Association of the United States in the Bronx, an organization that is now the largest Chinese Buddhist association in metropolitan New York. In 1970, they founded Bodhi House, an international gathering place for Buddhists from a wide range of traditions, on Long Island. They also donated land and support for Chuang Yen Monastery, a complex of temples, residences, and study centers north of New York City in Putnam County, which is among the largest Buddhist centers in this country. Their interest in ecumenical Buddhism led them to support the American work of the Sixteenth Gyalwa Karmapa, the head of the Karma Kagyu order. They donated land on which the Karmapa established the North American seat of the Karma Kagyus at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery in Woodstock, New York.
The Shens have also contributed a great deal to projects devoted to translating Buddhist texts into western languages. In 1968, they donated land in the San Francisco area to Hsuan Hua, the founder of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, to establish the Buddhist Text Translation Society. Three years later, they helped found the Institute for the Translation of the Chinese Tripitaka, the Chinese Buddhist canon, in Taiwan. They also established the Institute for Advanced Studies of World Religions, which is currently located on the grounds of the Chuang Yen monastery. C. T. Shen is himself considered an authority on the Diamond Sutra and has published studies and lectured on a number of other sutras important to the Mahayana tradition of east Asia. Most recently, he has been involved in one of a number of efforts to create a computer database of Buddhist scriptures in CDROM format.
Gary Snyder
is the most prominent Buddhist practitioner and poet to emerge from the Beat generation. He was born in San Francisco and raised in Washington State. He received his B.A. from Reed College, where he cultivated interests in Buddhism, haiku, and Chinese poetry. In 1952, he returned to San Francisco to study Asian languages at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1955, Snyder participated in the “Six Poets at the Gallery Six” poetry reading, a San Francisco event that brought East and West Coast poets together and helped to inaugurate the Beat movement. He was the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, a book that played a major role in popularizing the connection between Buddhism and the Beats. Snyder moved to Japan in 1956 to study and practice Zen at Daitokuji, a Rinzai monastery in Kyoto, where he remained for most of the 1960s. During these years, he published his first two books of poetry, Riprap and Myths and Texts.
Snyder returned to the United States in 1970 and settled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern California with his wife and family. Since that time, his writing, both poetry and critical essays, has increasingly addressed ecological issues and has been widely influential in the environmental movement. In 1975, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island, a collection of poetry that reflects Buddhist, ecological, and Native American themes and sensibilities. Over the decades, he has published eighteen books that have been translated into more than twenty languages. In 1997, he received both the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.
For his contribution to Buddhism in the United States, Snyder received the Buddhism Transmission Award from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation (Buddhist Awareness Foundation) in 1998. The first American literary figure to receive the award, he was honored for his longstanding interest in relating Zen thought and practice to modern ideas about the natural world. His most recent major work is Mountains and Rivers Without End, inspired in part by Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers sutra and by Chinese landscape painting. Since 1985, Snyder has taught at the University of California at Davis in the Creative Writing Program and in the Department of English. He founded “The Art of the Wild,” an annual conference devoted to the wilderness and creative writing, and helped to establish the Nature and Culture Program, an undergraduate academic major devoted to social and environmental concerns at UC-Davis.
Virginia Straus
has combined her religious convictions and professional interests in her work in Soka Gakkai International. Born in 1948 in Walpole, Massachusetts, Straus was raised in the Episcopalian church, but by the time she went away to Smith College she considered herself an agnostic. At Smith and then later at Stanford University, her fundamental questions raised by Christianity were sharpened as she explored French existentialism and modern English literature, but she found satisfying answers only later, in Nichiren’s Buddhist philosophy. Straus also began to develop a professional life devoted to social issues. She eventually moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked on public policy, first for Congressman John Anderson and later in the White House under Jimmy Carter. During this period, she learned a great deal about national, state, and local policy issues. At the end of the Carter administration, Straus moved to New York and took a position in the publishing industry.
At about this time, a friend introduced her to Nichiren Buddhism at a meeting in Greenwich Village, where she met performers and other artists chanting daimoku. Dubious at first, she was given a sutra book, began to chant at home, and soon felt her outlook on life begin to change. She explored Nichiren’s philosophy and the writings of Daisaku Ikeda, and in 1983 received a gohonzon. From the start, Straus found the diversity of people practicing Nichiren Buddhism to be a source of inspiration; as she became more involved in the organization, it provided many opportunities for bonding with women from a wide range of backgrounds. Later in the 1980s, she traveled to Japan where she viewed first hand the controversies over the SGI movement. She came away from this experience more impressed with the leaders of the movement than with their critics.
Once back in this country, Straus relocated to Massachusetts and became involved in the movement’s shakubuku campaigns and culture festivals. She renewed her commitment to working on social issues and helped to found the Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research, an independent think tank addressing state and local policy questions. In 1993, when Daisaku Ikeda founded the Boston Research Center for the Twenty-first Century, a Soka Gakkai International affiliate organization devoted to peace, ecology, and other progressive social issues, Straus served as its first Executive Director. She now sees her work at the Center as a natural expression of a long-standing aspiration to unite philosophy and social action in her professional life.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Geoffrey DeGraff)
was first exposed to Buddhist meditation at Oberlin College, when he participated in a Winter Term project with a Thai monk and a Zen monk. After graduation in 1971, he won a two-year fellowship to teach in Chieng Mai, Thailand, and toward the end of that time he began studying meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, a member of the Thai Forest Tradition. During a brief return to the States, Thanissaro weighed the relative merits of academic and monastic life. While attending a panel on Buddhist studies, he realized that he aspired to more than the householder’s path. He returned to Thailand for ordination in 1976 and studied with Ajaan Fuang until the latter’s death in 1986.
In 1991, Ajaan Suwat Suvaco, another member of the Forest Tradition, invited him to help start Metta Forest Monastery, or Wat Metta, in a hilltop avocado grove in the mountains of northern San Diego County. Thanissaro was named its abbot in 1993. In 1995, he became the first westerner authorized to be a preceptor or teacher by the Dhammayut Order in Thailand. He currently serves on the governing board of the Dhammayut Order in the United States.
Thanissaro is also well known as a scholar and translator of Buddhist texts and teachings from both Pali and Thai. While with Ajaan Fuang, he translated the complete writings of Ajaan Lee Dhammadharo, Ajaan Fuang’s teacher; in the years since, he has translated the writings of other members of the Forest Tradition, such as Ajaan Mun, Ajaan Maha Boowa, and Ajaan Thate. He has also translated the Dhammapada and an anthology of Pali sutras for the website “Access to Insight.” He is the author of The Buddhist Monastic Code, The Mind Like Fire Unbound, The Wings to Awakening, and Refuge, and coauthor of the fourth edition of The Buddhist Religion. A regular teacher at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, Thanissaro was instrumental in setting up the center’s Dhamma Dana Publication Fund, which is dedicated to the free distribution of Buddhist texts in the United States.
Thich Thien-An
is among the pioneering Asian teachers who brought Buddhism to this country in the 1960s. He was born in Hue, Vietnam in 1926 and grew up in a Buddhist family. He entered the monastery at the age of fourteen, where he continued his education. He eventually earned a Doctor of Literature degree from Waseda University in Japan, where he also received training in the Rinzai Zen tradition; he then returned to Vietnam. The escalation of the war had an immense impact on his life. His father, Tieu-Dieu, was among the monks who immolated themselves in order to draw the world’s attention to the Vietnam War and helped precipitate the downfall of South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem government.
Thien-An arrived in southern California in 1966 as an exchange professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, where his students encouraged him to teach Buddhist meditation in addition to his academic subjects. Several years later, he applied for permanent residence and founded the International Buddhist Meditation Center, a residential practice community in inner-city Los Angeles. For a number of years, Thien-An was devoted to teaching nonsectarian Buddhism to his American students, which required the adaptation of Asian traditions to American values and mores. Like many Asian teachers, he looked forward to the day when western Buddhism would help to revive the dharma in Asia.
When Saigon fell and the American troops were evacuated, Thien-An was faced with a very different kind of responsibility. Over the next few years, Vietnamese began to arrive in this country in increasing numbers, often in dire straits after years as refugees. In response, Thien-An turned the Center into a residence for refugees. His American monks and students joined newly arrived Vietnamese monastics to provide badly needed religious and social services. Thien-An soon established the first Vietnamese temple in this country, Chua Vietnam, in an apartment building in central Los Angeles that also served as a refugee residential facility. He was later appointed the first Supreme Patriarch of Vietnamese Buddhism in America. Before his early death from cancer in 1980, he established a considerable legacy that continues in the work of the Center today and includes rigorous practice, higher education, social service, and the example of cooperative interaction among Buddhists from a variety of national backgrounds and traditions.