Zen Master Wu Bong, Jacob Perl, dies at age 62

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Paris, France -- Zen Master Wu Bong of the Kwan Um School of Zen died in Paris of a heart attack on April 17, 2013 at the age of 62.

Ven. Wu Bong, a Soen Sa Nim (Zen master) was Head Teacher of the Kwan Um School of Zen Europe and was a student of the late Zen Master Seung Sahn, from who he received inka and dharma transmission in 1993.

He was Seung Sahn Sunim’s first American student, having previously practiced with Shunryu Suzuki at the San Francisco Zen Center and also with Tarthang Tulku.

He helped Zen Master Seung Sahn in establishing the Kwan Um School of Zen in Poland in 1978. Soen Sa Nim graduated from Brown University where his concentration was mathematics and holds a fourth degree black belt in Shim Gum Do, a Korean art of swordsmanship. 

In 1993, Soen Sa Nim received the transmission of Dharma and became the seventy-ninth Patriarch in his lineage.

Since 2010 Ven. Wu Bong divided his time between monastic practice in Korea and his duties as Head Teacher of Kwan Um’s European branch.

He began teaching in Europe in 1984, the year he received inka. Zen Master Wu Bong was a fourth degree black belt in Shim Gum Do (Korean swordsmanship) and was a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

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The Art of Mindfulness with Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh

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Seoul, South Korea -- Plum Village sits silently within the serene countryside of Bordeaux, France.

The peaceful country road leads to a warm outburst of sunflower fields and the endless fields of ripening grape vines.

Bordeaux, also known as the wine country, mesmerizes all passerby with the sweet fragrances of their famous grapes. During the Summer, when the Sunflower are in full bloom, the footsteps of practitioners who came from afar in search of the Buddha dharma and a peaceful mind imprint the country road leading to Plum Village.

Returning to the home of your mind is like returning to the warm embrace of your mother. Plum Village follows the essence of Mahayana Buddhism, but adapted the practice in order to fit the cultural conditions of the Western people. The melodic and serene chanting of the Buddhist Sutras in Vietnamese by the monastics of Plum Village calms the mind of practitioners.

“I have arrived. I am home.”

This is the mantra that Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, (called Thây, which means teacher in Vietnamese, by his students)  has given to all that come to Plum Village. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, a poet, a scholar, and a peace activist. His life long efforts to generate peace and reconciliation moved Martin Luther King, Jr. to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. He founded the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon and the School for Youths of Social Services in Vietnam.

Thây was the one who created the spiritual home for thousands of people across the globe. He reached his awakening amidst the tumultuous time of the Vietnam war and exile from Vietnam. Through his teachings on the Art of Mindfulness, Thây realized that Buddhism needs to change according to the current generation.

The people's deep reverence for Thây and his teachings can be felt through their actions and the teachings that they follow. In a very few words, Thây puts in very simple terms what many of us struggle to come to terms with. His teachings, "The Art of Mindful Living" is very simple and easy to understand. People from all different religion respect and follow Thây's well-spoken takes on core Buddhist ideas.

The Art of Mindful Living is the core teaching at Plum Village. The Mindfulness practice begins with observing our daily routines such as walking, eating and sleeping with mindfulness.  By perceiving the world with mindfulness, our structured daily routines are transformed into daily happiness and miracles.

The mind that is not tamed also does not follow the body. Thus, with every small step, the mind aligns itself to become mindful. When the mind begins to follow the body, happiness is no longer in the future. The practitioners that follow Thây's teachings are able to experience the happiness brought upon by mindfulness and serenity.

In Plum Village, the monastics follow their own rituals, while the practitioners spend their time casually. No one forces anybody to practice. All the practices at Plum VIllage is done voluntary.

In the eyes of the conservative Asian Buddhist, the practice programs taught at Plum Village is simple and casual.Each year, the practitioners return to their spiritual hometown, because the intimacy and relaxation of being in your hometown can awaken deep emotions.

It is here in Plum Village where one can alleviate some of the stress created from our capitalistic and materialistic society.

Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh and 40 monastics from Plum Village will be coming to Seoul, Korea in May 2013, as part of his Asian Teaching Tour and offer his teachings,  “The Art of Mindfulness.” This event will be hosted by the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, and Buddhist Television Network (BTN).

The schedule is as follows:

3 - 7 May
Weoljeongsa Retreat

10 May
Busan Public Talk at Beomeosa Temple (15:00 local time)

12 May
Day of Mindfulness at Dongguk University

13 May
Seoul Public Talk at Jamshil Indoor Gymnasium (19:00 local time)

14 May
Wake Up program at International Seon Center

On May 3rd to May 7th, Thây will be hosting his mindfulness retreat at the Woljeongsa temple, where participants will enjoy a temple-stay program while sharing their dharma experiences with Thây and Plum Village monastics. This event is open to all public and will be held in English with Korean translations.

On May 10th, Thây will give a public talk, “Peace is Possible,” to commemorate the 60th years of Peace between North Korea and South Korea.  This event will begin at 3pm and is open to all public and will be held in English with Korean translations. To arrive at Beomosa temple, take the Busan Subway to Beomeosa Station (Busan Subway Line No.1), take Exit No.5 or No.7 and walk between the two exits along the road for about 5 minutes  until you reach the Samsin bus stop. Take Bus No.90 and you will arrive at Beomeosa Temple Ticket Office.

May 12th is the Day of Mindfulness. The Day of Mindfulness is a daylong program which will be held at Dongguk University in Seoul.  During this program, one can cultivate mindfulness in our daily lives.  Other activities include walking meditation, formal lunch together with the community, and a discussion of the practice in the afternoon. All activities are led by Thây and the Plum Village monastics. The day usually ends around 4:00 pm. This event is open to all public and will be held in English with Korean translations.

On May 13th, Thây will give a public talk, “Stop and Heal,” for the Korean public at the Jamshil Indoor Gymnasium, starting at 7pm. This event is open to all public and will be held in English with Korean translations by Ven. Haemin, a Korean monastic who graduated Harvard University and teaching at the University of Massachusetts.

To arrive at Jamshil Indoor Gymnasium take the Seoul Subway Line 2 to Sports Complex Station and Exit #6 or #7.

Tickets are available on Interpark:

http://ticket.interpark.com/Ticket/Goods/GoodsInfo.asp?GoodsCode=13001577

On May 14th, the Plum Village monastics will be holding the Wake Up Program for the young people in Korea. The Wake Up program - Young Adults for a Healthy and Compassionate Society, is a world-wide network of young people practicing the living art of mindfulness, where everybody shares the determination to live in an awakened way. This event will be open to all young people (18-35years old) and will be held at the International Seon Center in Mokdong, Seoul.

For more information on Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh’s Korea tour in May, please access:

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Zen master: Buddhist monk remembered for simple, peaceful life

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VICTOR, MO (USA) -- It’s fitting that the wide open spaces and soaring mountains of Montana would attract someone like Zen Master Genki Takabayashi, whose name means “high pine forest.” Yet there is nothing predictable about the Buddhist monk’s journey here, his final resting place.

<< LINDA THOMPSON - Missoulian
Genki Takabayashi performs a cleansing ceremony and blessing in 2008 of the T-1 Building, where hearings were held for Japanese-Americans brought to the Fort Missoula Alien Detention Center during World War II.

Takabayashi, who died last month at the age of 81, left Japan nearly 35 years ago at the invitation of a University of Washington art history professor, Glen Webb. Webb had opened a small Zen center in Seattle, and needed someone to teach meditation.

After meeting Takabayashi at a temple during a visit to Japan, the professor asked the monk to help. He initially demurred, but agreed to move after Webb purchased him a plane ticket, and became a resident teacher at the Seattle Zen Teacher, which Webb founded.

“I met him at a temple in Japan and I thought he would be a good person to bring to Seattle,” Webb recalls. “Of course this was challenging to me because he spoke no English and I had to do all translating for a long time.”

Takabayashi learned of Zen as a boy in a Japanese mountain village, and as a young man apprenticed as a monk in a monastery in Kyoto called Daitoku-Ji, the head temple of the Rinza school of Japanese Zen, founded in the 14th century. He remained there for 25 years before meeting Webb.

Shortly after arriving in Seattle, Webb invited the Dalai Lama to visit and speak, and Takabayashi had occasion to meet the high lama.

“I was in charge of his talk and Genki was very excited about that,” Webb said.

But Takabayashi subscribed to a specific lineage of the Rinzai denomination, and his views on teaching a singular application of Zen meditation differed from Webb’s ecumenical approach. The two men went their separate ways in 1983, but Webb said Takabayashi’s time at the Zen center was valuable.

“He had a wonderful, positive effect on a number of peoples’ lives,” Webb said. “He taught by example.”

Takabayashi practiced the spiritual discipline of Zen Buddhism virtually all his life, and was one of only a few native Japanese teachers of the Rinzai school in America. Drawing on that experience, he opened the Dai Bai Zan Cho Bo Zen Ji on Seattle’s Beacon Hill. Another of Webb’s students, Genjo Joe Marinello, apprenticed there with Takabayashi, and succeeded his mentor when he moved to Montana in 1997.

Marinello was studying under Webb when Takabayashi first arrived from Japan, and the two men developed a sort of pidgin English that only they could understand.

“Nobody could understand us, but we knew what we were talking about and that was all that mattered,” Marinello said. “He was very gentle, very down to earth, and he could sit like a rock. He was the shining example of how to enter Zazen meditation, just sitting, just breathing, just listening.”

Marinello said Takabayashi was so dedicated to his practice and his tradition that he remembers being surprised when, after arriving in Seattle, one of the first foods he requested was a hamburger.

“We really didn’t expect that,” he said. “He was very simple, and an absolute pleasure to know. He was a bright, jovial, caring spirit.”

Marinello was ordained in 1980 and trained with Takabayashi in Seattle until his retirement 17 years later. He said there was no conflict between the serenity of their sitting meditation and the clutter of city living.

“It’s pretty simple what we were trying to achieve. The idea is to sit and touch some depth beyond yourself and let that depth express itself or flower in daily life in a creative or compassionate way that helps you in your daily life,” he said. “We had all of the complications of a city life. We were in the midst of a city but we grounded our lives with meditation. I think it made our city life sane, so we could face it with equanimity and peace of mind and a caring spirit.”

Takabayashi eventually fell in love with one of his students, Leslie Gannon, who had come to the temple to live after returning from a retreat in India. The couple moved to Ronan, where they opened a small Zen center, hosting meditation and tea ceremonies, and displaying Takabayashi’s ceramic art and calligraphy.

Gannon recalls driving through a snowstorm to Helena so that Takabayashi could obtain his citizenship, which he’d lived without through the years. When they arrived, the skies cleared and, when asked by the official why he wanted to be a U.S. citizen, Takabayashi waved his arm toward a window.

“He said, ‘There are beautiful skies in Montana,’ ” Gannon recalls. “The man stamped his paper and that was it.”

Ian Marquand, a journalist and one of the founders of the Japan Friendship Club, met Takabayashi and Gannon during a new moon viewing ceremony at the couple’s Ronan home, and remained friends with the couple.

“He was always just so pleasant. There was something restorative about being with him, and it seemed important to be able to share a little bit about who he was with the community,” Marquand said. “I wanted to share what he gave to me with other people.”

Having taken numerous trips to Japan, Marquand shared photos of his trips with the couple, and drank Sake and ceremonial green tea with Takabayashi.

The couple relocated to Victor, and a month before Takabayashi’s death, they were in a car accident. His heart was damaged in the crash, and he never recovered from the complications, which were exacerbated by diabetes.

Gannon said her husband was pleased to have lived as long as he did, and happy to die in Montana.

“He was very comfortable with Montana and with Montanans because they are all down to earth, and he certainly was very down to earth,” she said. “He gardened and made pottery. It was a very humble life, but he loved it.”

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Master Jinje, Revered Korean Buddhist Teacher, Travels To U.S. For First Time

NEW YORK -- On the rare occasions that Master Jinje travels outside his monastery in the rural mountains of South Korea, he is greeted by crowds of Koreans who have taken to practicing Ganhwa Seon, the unique form of Zen meditation that he has spent decades imparting on the nation's largely non-monastic, non-Buddhist population.

But when Master Jinje, a high-level monk of Jogye, South Korea's largest Buddhist order, wandered past the hot dog stands and bodegas of New York City's Morningside Heights neighborhood in his grey monastic robes earlier this week, few people turned their heads.

Outside South Korea, where Buddhism has roughly 11 million followers and Master Jinje is revered as one of the nation's pre-eminent meditation teachers, he is little-known by those other than Buddhism scholars and a small number of Korean Buddhist immigrants. In fact, until last week, the 78-year-old had rarely stepped foot outside East Asia and had never come to the United States.

"Just as I imagined, in the land of freedom, the streets are so busy," Master Jinje said this week through a translator while touring New York's Riverside Church, where he will give a free "Dharma talk" Thursday evening. "People in this city are so fortunate. It's so lively, so full of energy. Even here, one can meditate."

The Jogye Order, which runs many of Korea's oldest and most prominent Buddhist temples, including the the Donghwasa Temple where Master Jinje resides on the far outskirts of the southeastern city of Daegu, has recently initiated an effort to spread long-isolated Korean Buddhism outside the region. This month, the first U.S. chapter of the Jogye Order is being established to oversee 30 Korean temples in New York and New Jersey.

The public relations effort by the order also may be tied to troubles Buddhists have experienced in South Korea, where almost half the nation adheres to no religion and 13 million are Protestant or Roman Catholic, making Christianity the most popular religion. In recent years, the Jogye Ordrer has accused the Christian-led government of discriminating against Buddhists, and there have been cases of Christian extremists burning and defacing Buddhist temples.

But Master Jinje, who has had several closed-door meetings with unnamed local and international officials to discuss those religious tensions since landing in the U.S. last Saturday, said his primary purpose is a spiritual one.

"I was told in Korea that nowadays people in America are very interested in meditative practice, but I heard they use different kinds of methods. The method I use is helpful for me and others in Korea, so I hope I can share it," Master Jinje said, referring an an upshot in popularity of Buddhism-related practices in the U.S. in the last decade, from meditation retreats to recreational yoga.

Buddhism has several branches and sub-branches, and has taken varied cultural forms since it originated between the fourth and sixth centuries B.C. in India. Master Jinje practices Ganwa Seon, which is most often likened to Japanese Zen with its focus on meditation -- as opposed to theoretical study -- in order to reach selflessness and enlightenment. Ganhwa Seon developed independently of the Japanese tradition and traces its origins to seventh-century contact with Chinese Buddhists.

When teaching Ganhwa Seon, Master Jinje makes use of "questioning meditation," in which hwadu, or "topics of inquiry," are used in order to raise uijeong, or a "sensation of doubt," in the person meditating.

"If I was to ask you: What was your original face before your parents gave birth to you? If you kept asking yourself and were able to get to the bottom of that question, then doubt will arise and once doubt arises then there comes a time when doubt appears all the time, 24 hours a day in your activities," he said, attempting to define a complex meditation technique that some of his students have studied for decades. "And after a time, you will be able to have a breakthrough. When you have that breakthrough, you will see the basic fundamental of your mind, which is already pure, which is already pristine."

Master Jinje teaches at Haeunjeongsa Temple in Busan City, Korea, pictured above. He also teaches at Donghwasa Temple near Daegu, Korea.

Although Master Jinje typically teaches Buddhist monks, he said his New York visit, including the Riverside Church speech, has caused him to think more about how meditation can be incorporated into the lives of everyday Americans and non-Buddhists.

"That doubt, it exists every day in your daily regular activity. Whether you are washing dishes or taking your kids to school or using the bathroom. It is in front of you all the time," he said, emphasizing his belief that humans should try to maintain an awareness of their actions, however mundane.

"I have a lot of respect for different religious practice," he added. "Regardless of what religion you believe in, you all use your mind. You have mind, I have mind. Everybody has mind. And because everybody has mind, what I am asking you to ask yourself is how that mind first came to exist."

The spiritual leader was not always so philosophical. He lived a largely secular life until he was 19 years old, when he met a Korean Seon master who offered to train him to become a monk. Master Jinje moved to a monastery, where he studied and meditated for 13 years before one of his predecessors, Seon Master Hyanggok, recognized him as the 79th "dharma descendant," or hand-picked spiritual descendant, of Buddha. His name is often paired with this title, although experts say there are dozens of lineages of "dharma descendants" of Buddha and the validity of each is contested.

That said, "he is one of the two most pre-eminent Seon teachers, with the other being in northern South Korea," said Robert Buswell, a Buddhism professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has helped coordinate Master Jinje's visit. "When he gives talks in Korea, thousands of people show up. But he has never taught in the U.S. and he has never written in English. There would never have been a way for any American or student of Buddhism or Zen to have heard of him."

One of the few who has heard of him is Uni Berrie, a 57-year-old New Yorker who met Master Jinje five years ago in South Korea. Born in Soeul to a Catholic family, Berrie said she never practiced a formal religion but always felt a spiritual yearning. After several visits back home to Korea over the years, she met him through a friend and enrolled in one of his teaching courses. Soon, she found herself practicing Ganwa Seon every day.

"I've tried yoga, I've tried Tibetan training, I've tried intensive Buddhism training of all kinds," said Berrie, who does not call herself a Buddhist. "But his teaching is about finding the true self, and you don't have to go to a temple. The more you sit, the more you meditate, the deeper you get into your understanding of yourself. It's hard to put into words."

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