My wife Sara and I have been members of St. Christopher Episcopal Church in Carmel some 4 or 5 years, although she was raised Methodist and I Presbyterian. We attend services a couple of Sundays a month. I particularly appreciate the communal (and generally liberal) feeling in the congregation, the singing, taking communion, and the rhythm of the liturgy through the year. Sara is active in various church activities, but my "extracurricular" time is spent mostly in activities with three different Zen Buddhist centers.
We are both retired (Sara as an educator, mostly in IPS administration as a reading specialist; me as a commercial insurance broker, mostly for nonprofit and healthcare organizations). We're both originally from Indiana small cities up north. Both widowed, we met on Match in late 2017, were instantly in love, remodeled her home in the Sunblest neighborhood in Fishers for the two of us, and got married on Zoom during Covid.
I've been a practicing Zen Buddhist and a member of the Rochester (NY) Zen Center since 1971. I have a daily meditation practice. My first teacher was Philip Kapleau, founder of the RZC and author of (among others) The Three Pillars of Zen. When Roshi Kapleau retired in the early 1990's I became a formal student of his primary successor, Bodhin Kjolhede Roshi. Over the decades I've participated in scores of intensive silent meditation retreats (sesshin), sitting ten or more hours a day, most of them seven-days long. I curate and moderate a monthly Zoom discussion group for the RZC called Dharma Reflections.
In 2022, Bodhin Roshi stopped full-time teaching and after a national search for other options, I became a formal student of Rafe Martin Roshi at Endless Path Zendo (also in Rochester NY); I do sittings and take private instruction with him twice weekly (on Zoom) and participate in 3 or 4 sesshin (usually of four or five days length) with his group, mostly in person either in NY or VT.
I'm also active as co-leader of the Indianapolis Zen Center, sitting there two evenings a week and serving as timer and giving Dharma talks at monthly all-day sitting retreats.
I've undertaken a very informal and haphazard study recently of the contemplative tradition in Christianity, having read some Richard Rohr, Martin Laird, Cyprian Consiglio, David Bentley Hart, Maggie Ross, Thomas Traherne, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, and Karen Armstrong.
My favorite contemporary philosopher, by far, is Iain McGilchrist, because he grounds his reasoning and conclusions in neurophisiology and modern physics, and has distilled a lot of the best (IMO) Eastern and Western religious and philosophical thought into a solvent that cuts very deep indeed into some of the toughest and most important questions about being, consciousness, values, meaning, and the perilous conditions we find ourselves in today.
I understand your group watched an interview of James Ford Roshi recently - he is very high on my list of the "real deal" Zen teachers in the West these days. I have enjoyed several of his books and I follow him on Substack, Patheos, and Facebook. His Zen lineage (tracing back through Aitken Roshi to the estimable 20th Century Japanese Zen Masters Yamada Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, and Harada Dai-un Roshi. Philip Kapleau Roshi trained under Harada and Yasutani, and Rafe Martin Roshi (my current teacher) holds the lineage both through Kapleau and Aitken roshis.
My plan (feel free to suggest modifications) for the upcoming 25 minute or so talk in April will be to give a brief general overview of Buddhism and its primary tenets and sketch its history as it has migrated around the world, and then to consider the implications of those tenets for us Westerners today, as viewed through the prism of the Zen schools (Zen basically means meditation, so Zen is the meditation-focused branch of Buddhism). As a teaser, here is a little verse attributed to the founder of Zen in China, Bodhidharma, who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries of the current era, presenting what his teaching was:
A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not dependent on words or letters,
Pointing directly to the human heart-mind;
Waking up, becoming Buddha.
I would most look forward to questions from all of you, both during my talk and afterward, so that we can get right down to what is of concern and import to you.
We are both retired (Sara as an educator, mostly in IPS administration as a reading specialist; me as a commercial insurance broker, mostly for nonprofit and healthcare organizations). We're both originally from Indiana small cities up north. Both widowed, we met on Match in late 2017, were instantly in love, remodeled her home in the Sunblest neighborhood in Fishers for the two of us, and got married on Zoom during Covid.
I've been a practicing Zen Buddhist and a member of the Rochester (NY) Zen Center since 1971. I have a daily meditation practice. My first teacher was Philip Kapleau, founder of the RZC and author of (among others) The Three Pillars of Zen. When Roshi Kapleau retired in the early 1990's I became a formal student of his primary successor, Bodhin Kjolhede Roshi. Over the decades I've participated in scores of intensive silent meditation retreats (sesshin), sitting ten or more hours a day, most of them seven-days long. I curate and moderate a monthly Zoom discussion group for the RZC called Dharma Reflections.
In 2022, Bodhin Roshi stopped full-time teaching and after a national search for other options, I became a formal student of Rafe Martin Roshi at Endless Path Zendo (also in Rochester NY); I do sittings and take private instruction with him twice weekly (on Zoom) and participate in 3 or 4 sesshin (usually of four or five days length) with his group, mostly in person either in NY or VT.
I'm also active as co-leader of the Indianapolis Zen Center, sitting there two evenings a week and serving as timer and giving Dharma talks at monthly all-day sitting retreats.
I've undertaken a very informal and haphazard study recently of the contemplative tradition in Christianity, having read some Richard Rohr, Martin Laird, Cyprian Consiglio, David Bentley Hart, Maggie Ross, Thomas Traherne, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, and Karen Armstrong.
My favorite contemporary philosopher, by far, is Iain McGilchrist, because he grounds his reasoning and conclusions in neurophisiology and modern physics, and has distilled a lot of the best (IMO) Eastern and Western religious and philosophical thought into a solvent that cuts very deep indeed into some of the toughest and most important questions about being, consciousness, values, meaning, and the perilous conditions we find ourselves in today.
I understand your group watched an interview of James Ford Roshi recently - he is very high on my list of the "real deal" Zen teachers in the West these days. I have enjoyed several of his books and I follow him on Substack, Patheos, and Facebook. His Zen lineage (tracing back through Aitken Roshi to the estimable 20th Century Japanese Zen Masters Yamada Roshi, Yasutani Roshi, and Harada Dai-un Roshi. Philip Kapleau Roshi trained under Harada and Yasutani, and Rafe Martin Roshi (my current teacher) holds the lineage both through Kapleau and Aitken roshis.
My plan (feel free to suggest modifications) for the upcoming 25 minute or so talk in April will be to give a brief general overview of Buddhism and its primary tenets and sketch its history as it has migrated around the world, and then to consider the implications of those tenets for us Westerners today, as viewed through the prism of the Zen schools (Zen basically means meditation, so Zen is the meditation-focused branch of Buddhism). As a teaser, here is a little verse attributed to the founder of Zen in China, Bodhidharma, who lived in the 5th and 6th centuries of the current era, presenting what his teaching was:
A special transmission outside the scriptures,
Not dependent on words or letters,
Pointing directly to the human heart-mind;
Waking up, becoming Buddha.
I would most look forward to questions from all of you, both during my talk and afterward, so that we can get right down to what is of concern and import to you.