ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
JANET JIRYU ABELS is the founder and now coresident teacher, with Gregory Hosho Abels, of Still Mind Zendo in New York City (stillmindzendo.org) and the guiding teacher of Plum Blossom Zendo in Pittsburgh. She received Dharma transmission as a Zen teacher in the Soto White Plum lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi in 2000. She is a certified Bio-Spiritual Focusing teacher and is a member of the White Plum Asanga as well as the Lay Zen Teachers Association. She’s the author of Making Zen Your Own: Giving Life to Twelve Key Golden Age Ancestors.
MAX ERDSTEIN teaches vipassana meditation at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, and the Insight Retreat Center in Santa Cruz. He was trained as a dharma teacher by Gil Fronsdal and participated in the Spirit Rock/IMS teacher training program. He has practiced Vipassana and Zen in California, Japan, Thailand, and Burma. He received lay ordination in the Soto Zen tradition from Sojun Mel Weitsman in 2007.
ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER is a poet, writer, and Zen priest. He is the founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation, a network of Zen (and other) groups and partnerships dedicated to sharing the Zen teaching and practice widely in the world (everydayzen.org). He writes regularly for the Buddhist magazines, and his podcasts are favorites for practitioners from all lineages. The latest of his more than twenty books of poetry, prose, and translation are Magnolias All At Once (poetry), Experience: On Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion (essays), and What Is Zen: Plain Talk for a Beginner’s Mind (prose — written with Sue Moon).
GIL FRONSDAL is part of the Vipassana teachers’ collective at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He was ordained as a Soto Zen priest at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1982 and was a Theravada monk in Burma in 1985. In 1995, he received Dharma transmission from Mel Weitsman, the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. He is the guiding teacher of the Insight Meditation Center of Redwood City, California. He has a PhD in Buddhist studies from Stanford University.
MARC R. POIRIER (1952–2015) was a professor of law and Martha Traylor Research Scholar at Seton Hall Law Schools specializing in LGBT and environmental issues. He taught meditation to the students and faculty of his law school and to lawyers and college students in New Jersey and New York City. A longtime practitioner at Ordinary Mind Zendo, he received lay entrustment from his teacher, Barry Magid, and was active in the Lay Zen Teachers Association.
Marc died of lymphoma before this volume could be published. We miss him greatly.
GRACE SCHIRESON is a Dharma teacher in the Suzuki Roshi lineage empowered by Sojun Mel Weitsman, abbot of Berkeley Zen Center. She was asked by Keido Fukushima Roshi, chief abbot of Tofukuji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan, to teach the koans she had studied with him. Grace is the head teacher of the Central Valley Zen Foundation and founded two Zen groups and a Zen retreat center in California. Grace is also a clinical psychologist who has specialized in women and families. She’s the author of Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters.
HOZAN ALAN SENAUKE is a Zen priest and vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center in California. As a Buddhist activist Alan works with the International Network of Engaged Buddhists and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. He is on the core faculty of Upaya Zen Center’s chaplaincy training program. In 2007 he founded Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for social change in Asia and the US. Alan presently serves as president of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, a US body of Soto Zen priests. In other lives Alan is a student of American “traditional” music and author of The Bodhisattva’s Embrace: Dispatches from Engaged Buddhism’s Front Lines and Heirs to Ambedkar: The Rebirth of Engaged Buddhism in India.
ROBERT H. SHARF is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, as well as Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies, at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily on medieval Chinese Buddhism but has also published in the areas of Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. In addition to various articles and book chapters, he is the author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002), and co-editor of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context (2001).
SALLIE JIKO TISDALE is a lay Dharma teacher at Dharma Rain in Portland, Oregon. Her many essays have appeared in Harper’s, Antioch Review, Conjunctions, Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, and Tricycle, among other journals. She is the author of seven books, including Women of the Way. Her new book, Violation, a collection of essays, will be published in 2016 by Hawthorne Books.
SOJUN MEL WEITSMAN established Berkeley Zen Center in Berkeley, California, in 1967 at the behest of his teacher, Shunryu Suzuki. He continues to serve as the abbot and guiding teacher there. He received Dharma transmission in 1984 from Suzuki’s son Hoitsu. He is also a former coabbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, where he served from 1988 to 1997.