The information is condensed from survey results conducted by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association (SZBA) Training Committee.  The directory only contains information from those centers which are affiliated with the SZBA and which chose to participate in the survey.

Please contact the individual center for program details.

The director, a PDF file, can be accessed by clicking on this link:

SZBA Directory of Intensive Practices

The SZBA Conference took place at the beginning of October at Great Vow Zen Monastery. It was the largest conference we have had so far with 91 participants. There were 68 full members and 23 associate members. It was a great gathering of Soto Zen teachers and priests!

The keynote speakers both offered great talks. Dale Wright spoke on the strengths and weaknesses of Zen as well as challenges for the future. An mp3 of his talk can be accessed by clicking this link.

Duncan Ryuken Williams spoke on the hybridity of “Japanamerican” Zen and in particular, related some deeply moving stories from his research for his forthcoming book, Camp Dharma: Buddhism and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II. An mp3 of his talk can be accessed by clicking this link.

Both talks are highly recommended!

The Board seeks to embody a balance of various factors including gender, lineage, geography and approach to training.

The Board members of the SZBA include:

Taihaku Priest (President)

Shinkai Tanaka lineage

East Calais, VT

Taihaku Priest was born in 1946 and grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts.  From age 18 -24 she practiced at a meditation retreat in seclusion.  In 1971 she was sent by Suzuki Roshi to Japan to study Buddhism.  She practiced under Noiri Hakusan Roshi and Tanaka Shinkai Roshi among others.  She is a mother and grandmother.  She received jukai from Hakusan Roshi in 1988 and priest ordination from Tanaka Shinkai Roshi in 1999 followed by Priest training at Hokyoji Training Monastery in Japan until 2007.  She received Dharma transmission in 2005 from Tanaka Shinkai Roshi.  She built and established Shao Shan Temple, a small country temple in Vermont.  She is now serving as its’ Head priest and leads a growing sangha.  She was appointed to be a member of the SZBA Board in 2010 and appointed as president in October, 2012.

Domyo Burk (Vice-President)

Jiyu Kennett lineage

Portland, OR

Domyo Burk began Zen practice at Dharma Rain Zen Center (DRZC) in 1996 and was ordained as a Zen monk in 2001 by Gyokuko Carlson Roshi. The first seven years of Domyo’s monastic training were spent in full-time residential practice at DRZC except for a practice period at Tassajara monastery in California and time practicing at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon.

In October 2010, Domyo received transmission from Gyokuko Carlson Roshi. She was a full-time staff member at DRZC from 2000 until the fall of 2011, when she resigned in order to focus her Dharma work on a new Zen Center in another part of the Portland metro area, Bright Way Zen.

Domyo Sensei regards both Gyokuko Carlson Roshi and Kyogen Carlson Roshi, founders and co-abbots of Dharma Rain Zen Center, as her teachers. Her training at Dharma Rain gave her a profound respect for both lay and priest practice, and a passionate curiosity about how to inspire and support deep Zen practice in the midst of lay life.

Domyo became the first Associate member of the SZBA Board of Directors in 2008 and has been serving on the board since. She participated in the SZBA Dharma Heritage Ceremony in October 2012.

Daishin McCabe (Secretary)

Dai-En Bennage lineage

Pennsdale, PA

Rev. Daishin Eric McCabe is Assistant Teacher to Abbess Dai-En Bennage, under whom he has been training as a resident practitioner at Mt. Equity since 1998. Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1973, he grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was a competitive swimmer, and went to college at Bucknell University where, in 1995, he received a Bachelor’s Degree in Religion and Biology. He began practicing Zen in 1994 at Bucknell, where he met Abbess Dai-En.

After receiving Priest Precepts in 2004, Rev. Daishin was sent to train at several Zen Temples, including Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village in France, and Zuioji, Gotanjoji, and Shogoji in Japan. Prior to receiving Priest Precepts he also studied at Nebraska Zen Center under Rev. Nonin Chowaney and worked as a Certified Nurse’s Aide.

In 2008 Rev. Daishin received Transmission by Abbess Dai-En. In 2010 he was recognized as a teacher within the Soto Zen Buddhist Association in North America. In 2011 he fulfilled the requirements to be recognized as a teacher in Japan.

Ryushin Creedon

Taizan Maezumi lineage

Portland, OR

Ryushin Creedon is a Zen priest serving at Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple in Portland, Oregon. He began training with Chozen and Hogen Bays in 2000, lived and trained at Great Vow Zen Monastery for nine years, and was ordained in 2005. Ryushin relocated to Portland in 2011 to support the founding of Heart of Wisdom Zen Temple, where he currently serves as the Head of Zendo. Ryushin also serves on the  Board of Directors for the Zen Community of Oregon and the Soto Zen Buddhist Association. He is currently finishing his bachelor degree at Portland State University, volunteering at the Portland Women’s Crisis Line, and working at the Portland Sobering Station as an Emergency Medical Technician. He has studied Voice Dialogue concurrently with his Zen training, and has completed facilitator training through the Voice Dialogue Center Northwest.

Shotai De La Rosa

Shohaku Okumura lineage

Bloomington, IN

Shotai De La Rosa received Dharma transmission from Shohaku Okumura Roshi in 2005. She began her practice in 1989 in Bogotá, Colombia and started her monastic training in the temple Luz Serena, Spain with Rev. Dokusho Villalba and Fudenji, Italy, with Rev. Taiten Guareschi. She also trained at the San Francisco Zen Center (Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and City Center). Then, continued her residential studies with Shohaku Okumura Roshi in Sanshin Zen Community, Bloomington, Indiana.  Her monastic training continued at the Aichi Senmon Nisodo, Nagoya, Japan for a year, and in 2007 she received the title of kyoshi of the Soto Zen Buddhist School. She currently resides in Bloomington, Indiana and is the co-founder of the Colombia Soto Zen Community and member of the San Francisco Zen Center, the Soto Zen Buddhist Association and the Association of Soto Zen Buddhists.

Daijaku Kinst

Shunryu Suzuki lineage

Capitola, CA

Daijaku Judith Kinst was ordained in 1988 and received dharma transmission from Sojun Weitsman in 2004.   After priest training at San Francisco Zen Center, including four years at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, she completed an MA in counseling psychology, licensure as a psychotherapist, and a PhD in Buddhism and Psychology (Doctoral thesis: Trust Emptiness and the Self in the Practice of Soto Zen Buddhism).  During this time she also trained as a chaplain at the UCSF medical center.

She was founder and clinical director of Golden Gate ICC, a counseling center and training program that integrated Buddhist teachings and practices into the education of students completing a Master’s program in counseling psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies where she was also adjunct faculty. She also maintained a private psychotherapy practice.

Currently she is Professor of Buddhism and Buddhist Pastoral Care and Director of the Buddhist Chaplaincy Graduate Program at the Institute of Buddhist studies, a Buddhist seminary and an affiliate school of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley California. Her students at IBS come from a full range of Buddhist traditions, as well as other GTU seminaries, and are studying to be chaplains, clergy, and scholars.

As both a professor and Zen teacher she is actively involved in inter-tradition and interfaith dialogue and has led retreats with Buddhist teachers in Theravada and Tibetan traditions, including the Ven. Pema Chodron.

She co-founded Ocean Gate Zen Center with Rev. Shinshu Roberts, her partner of 25 years. Ocean Gate is a community zendo committed to welcoming all people who wish to study Soto Zen Buddhism.  Daijaku is active in the wider community, including clergy of all faiths who support diversity in their congregations.

She has presented and published articles on Buddhist pastoral care and chaplaincy, Buddhism and psychology, and interfaith subjects such as a Soto Zen perspective on Thomas Merton’s teachings on self surrender.

Ejo McMullen

Joshin Keira lineage

Eugene, OR

Hozan Alan Senauke

Shunryu Suzuki lineage

Berkeley, CA

Hozan Alan Senauke serves as vice-abbot of Berkeley Zen Center, where he has lived with his wife Laurie for nearly thirty years. Hozan is founder of the Clear View Project, developing Buddhist-based resources for relief and social change in Burma and India. For years he was executive director of Buddhist Peace Fellowship and remains active in BPF as Senior Advisor. Alan is also on the International Network of Engaged Buddhists’ Advisory Council. In another realm, Alan has been a close student and active performer of American traditional music for fifty years.

Participants in the 2010 National Conference

The SZBA will be holding its fifth National Conference October 3-7, 2012, at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon. The conference will offer participants a chance to connect and develop relationships with fellow Soto Zen teachers and priests of North America and help to build a foundation of mutual respect and trust. The conference is a chance to develop ties across lineages and nurture a collective sense of Soto Zen in North America.

The keynote speakers for the conference will be Professors Duncan Ryūken Williams and Dale Wright.

As we look to the future of Soto Zen in America, what are the most pressing questions facing our tradition and our communities of practice and what is the function of the SZBA in meeting these questions?

At the 2010 Conference, the Standards Committee was formed. Growing out of discussions at the conference, four training modalities were distinguished:
•    Monastic (90 day ango practice)
•    Residential training at a Zen center
•    Temple centered practice (“non-residential”)
•    Ministerial training (trainings on ministering to sangha that are not specific to Zen)

The Standards Committee has conducted a comprehensive survey in order to learn from SZBA members what kinds of standards are already in place among the varied sanghas of this organization. The data collected in the survey will provide the basis for further discussion at the 2012 conference, including the possibility of the SZBA adopting training standards to recognize Dharma transmission. It is hoped that establishing a minimum set of requirements for training will strengthen the integrity of Soto Zen in the West now and into the future.

The conference is open to full (dharma-transmitted) and associate (priest ordained) members of the SZBA. The conference will include the Dharma Heritage Ceremony.

The Dharma Heritage Ceremony was developed in the course of preparing for the first National Conference of the SZBA in 2004 at Great Vow Zen Monastery. It is a ritual of affirmation by one’s peers and a welcoming into the circle of Soto Zen leaders in the West. The Dharma Heritage Ceremony was designed, and is performed, collaboratively. The ceremony is structured by a group of “seniors” who welcome the “candidates.” For the first Dharma Heritage Ceremony, the seniors were those who had performed zuisse or haito. For subsequent ceremonies, seniors are those who had previously participated in the Dharma Heritage Ceremony. The first ceremony included 12 seniors and over 30 candidates, the second included around 40 seniors and 9 candidates, and the third included over 40 seniors and 13 candidates.

Professor William Bodiford, in his article “Dharma Transmission in Theory and Practice,” included in the volume Zen Ritual, edited by Steven Heine & Dale S. Wright, writes: “The Dharma Heritage Ceremony serves to remind Soto priests from these dissimilar Centers of the collective tradition they share. It provides a common ritual in which all of them can participate simultaneously, jointly offer homage to the founders of one another’s lineages, and formally acknowledge one another as religious peers. Clearly, it is designed to help foster the development of a new shared culture of dharma transmission. Each of the individual elements with the ceremony (the setting, musical instruments, processions, prostrations, circumambulations, chants, and so forth) consist of standard Zen ritual practices as performed at Buddhist temples in Japan. The ceremony as a whole, however, presents something new and uniquely American. Significantly, it concludes with all the participants chanting the Zen hymn known as the Harmony of Difference and Sameness, a title that aptly expresses the goal of the ceremony itself and the task now faced by the SZBA. Thus, the ceremony represents a development of traditional ritual forms for new purposes in a new land. It is a development that reflects both the growing maturity of Zen traditions in North America and their precarious, difficult quest to harmonize imported and native, old and new, similar and different.”

Similar to zuisse, a Japanese Soto Zen ceremony,  the entering group is offered to officiate the ceremony by the abbot of the temple. First, the candidates pay homage to the founders. The founders are those teachers who have come to this country and now have heirs. The candidate group then enters the Buddha Hall where the seniors have already assembled. The entering group performs a Jundo (circulating through the hall) in appreciation. The candidates then jointly officiate the ceremony. During the recitation of the Sandokai, the seniors circumambulate the candidates. When this is complete, the entire assembly joins in circumambulation. Finally, the lineage is recited. It is basically a ceremony of mutual recognition, enfolding and interweaving.

Although the Dharma Heritage Ceremony carries some of the same functions as the zuisse or haito ceremonies conducted in Japan, it is not a replacement. The Dharma Heritage Ceremony and zuisse/haito each have their own validity. Neither can substitute for the other but there are significant parallels.

Practically, the two ceremonies are quite different. They take place in different countries as part of different and independent organizations. The Sotoshu offers zuise and no ceremony offered here will ever replace it. It is a very particular, historical series of ceremonies built around being honorary abbot of Eiheiji and/or Sojiji, paying homage to the ancestral line, helping to fund those temples with one’s fees, undergoing further training in correct ceremonial performance, and receiving validation by the priests of the temple. It has a vertical quality of being received from above into a hierarchy, and it has a particular role in the Sotoshu certification process.

The SZBA has the Dharma Heritage Ceremony, in which each member coming for the first time to the biennial national conference enters the sangha of SZBA-member teachers. It includes homage to the ancestral line, and beyond that it is largely a horizontal form in which one is received into the group of peer teachers, corresponding to a peer-emphasizing quality of American society.

Zuise and the Dharma Heritage ceremony are alike or have a rough equivalence in that they are both ceremonies of completion and inclusion for Soto priests. In both ceremonies, the candidate is witnessed and affirmed. There is one further connection between them: during the first Dharma Heritage ceremony, the Seniors group was those who had performed zuise or haito, and that group “received” all the other participants at the conference into the sangha of Soto priest-teachers in North America. This was not intended as a kind of formal transmission, but as a way of approaching the process of passing on the tradition. Since the first Dharma Heritage Ceremony, everyone who has already entered the group by doing the ceremony forms the body of Seniors in the ceremony.

Some may hold an informal equivalence or correspondence between zuise and the Dharma Heritage Ceremony, but the Dharma Heritage Ceremony was not conceived to be an equivalent of zuise in a way that the Sotoshu might recognize. Rather, it is a ritual of affirmation by one’s peers, a welcoming into the circle of Soto Zen leaders in the West. This in turn serves to further one of the missions of the SZBA, to “facilitate trust, respect, communication, ethical conduct, and education among the many sanghas of Soto Zen lineages and in the wider community.”

Participants in the 2008 National Conference

The SZBA will be holding its Fourth National Conference October 6-10, 2010, at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon. The conference will offer participants a chance to connect and develop relationships with fellow Soto Zen teachers and priests of North America and help to build a foundation of mutual respect and trust to support and benefit each other in opening the Buddha Way to all beings. The conference is a chance to develop ties across lineages and nurture a collective sense of Soto Zen in North America.

The conference is open to full (dharma-transmitted) and associate (priest ordained) members of the SZBA. The conference will include the Dharma Heritage Ceremony.

The keynote speakers for the conference will be Professor William Bodiford and Shohaku Okumura.

The theme for the conference will be Keizan Jokin Zenji. Keizan, the 4th ancestor in the Japanese Soto Zen lineage, was born in 1264 in Echizen Province. Keizan is regarded, along with Eihei Dogen Zenji, as the co-founder of Soto Zen Buddhism in Japan. All SZBA lineages pass through Keizan.

Keizan is regarded in Soto circles particularly for his role in the expansion of Soto Zen throughout Japan and shaping the ritual foundation of the tradition. He made Soto Zen accessible to lay people and set the stage for its becoming the largest Zen school in Japan. His legacy is sometimes thus viewed as “external”, balancing Dogen’s “internal” emphasis.

Keizan’s Denkoroku (Transmission of the Light) is a collection of teisho on 53 koans tracing the transmission of Dharma from Shakyamuni Buddha to Koun Ejo. Keizan also encouraged, supported and passed the dharma on to many women. In this spirit, the conference will include the presentation of the Women’s Lineage Document prepared by the Women’s Lineage Committee.