Shōhaku Okumura
Founder and Abbot Shohaku Okumura, founder and abbot of Sanshin Zen Community, was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1948. In 1970, he was ordained by the late Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, one of the foremost Zen masters of the twentieth-century. He received Dharma transmission from his teacher in 1975 and, shortly after, became one of the founding members of Pioneer Valley Zendo in Massachusetts. He returned to Japan in 1981 and began translating the works of Dogen Zenji, Uchiyama Roshi and other Soto masters from Japanese into English. In 1993, he moved back to the United States with his wife, Yuko, and their two children. He has previously served as teacher at the Kyoto Soto Zen Center in Japan and at the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center in Minneapolis, and was Director of the Soto Zen International Center in San Francisco for thirteen years. Today, Okumura Roshi is recognized for his unique perspective on the life and teachings of Dogen Zenji derived from his experience as both practitioner and translator, and as a teacher in both Japanese and Western practice communities. He gives frequent lectures on the Shobogenzo and other foundational texts. His translations have been published in several books, including Dogen's Extensive Record (Wisdom Publications, 2004) and The Wholehearted Way (Tuttle Publishing, 1997), and his lectures have appeared in Buddhadharma: The Practitioner's Quarterly, Dharma Eye, and Buddhism Now. He continues to lead sesshin (intensive meditation retreats) and genzo-e (Shobogenzo study) retreats at Sanshinji and at various other centers in the US and around the world. |
Hōkō was ordained as a novice by Shohaku Okumura in 2005, and she completed her shuso hossen that same year at Kogetsu-an in Shiga, Japan. She received dharma transmission in September, 2012 and completed zuise at Eiheiji and Sojiji in November of that year. In January, 2016 Hōkō was named vice-abbot and successor at Sanshin. She previously served as communications director at Hokyoji Zen Practice Community in southern Minnesota from 2013 to 2016 and as interim practice director at Milwaukee Zen Center from 2011 to 2013. She has served as an adjunct instructor at Lakeland College in Sheboygan, WI, where she taught Eastern Religious Traditions in the classroom and online, and now teaches Zen through Ivy Tech Community College's lifelong learning program. She is recognized by Sotoshu as nito kyoushi (second-rank teacher) and as a practitioner of baika, a type of Japanese Buddhist hymn created by Sotoshu in 1952. She is serving her second four-year appointment from Sotoshu as kokusai fukyoushi, or international teacher.
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Shussui (work leader), Wednesday morning jikido/doan, Thursday morning doshi.
Hosshin Michael Shoaf found his way to meditation in his senior year in high school but didn’t really come to Zen practice until 1990 after reading Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. He moved to Bloomington in January of 1981 to enter Indiana University to study painting, sculpture and art history, finishing his studies in 1985. In 1986 he started a construction company that focused mainly on remodeling and renovation. Six years later Hosshin met Myoyu Andersen Roshi and began a 17-year practice with her that blended Soto and Rinzai Zen. At the same time he was part of a sitting group in Bloomington that later encouraged Okumura Roshi to consider that city as his base of operations. In 2009 he officially became a student of Okumura Roshi's at Sanshin. He ordained in 2013 and was shuso during the 2018 ango (practice period). These days, along with temple duties as work leader, Hosshin considers himself a cabinet and furniture maker, thoroughly enjoying the design process, finding it as satisfying as painting or sculpture. He lives in the woods in a 100 year old log cabin on the outskirts of town and is in the process of renovating it until he dies. |
Having first met Okumura Roshi at the “Many Faces of Dogen” conference at Zen Mountain Monastery in July 2004, Seigen moved to Bloomington in 2008 to practice with the Sanshin community. As a young man, he developed an interest in Taoism in college in the early 1970s and then shifted over to reading extensively on Zen Buddhism in the mid-1970s, taking up regular zazen practice following a first visit to the Paris Zen Temple in 1978. Through 1978-79 he would sit regularly Sunday mornings with a small, informal group of practitioners in Madrid, Spain, and he did his first summer sesshin with the sangha of the International Zen Association in the French Alps in August 1979. Having received precepts and the dharma name “Seigen” from Taisen Deshimaru in 1981, he was ordained two years later in that sangha. Throughout the 1980s and early 2000s, he did a number of sesshins at the Temple of La Gendronnière (including a five-month residence there in 1983) and in Quebec. Academically, he pursued grad studies in Spanish in Cincinnati and linguistics in Illinois and worked teaching (mainly) Spanish, including at the university level and in a local high school in Bloomington. Before moving to Indiana, he directed the Central Michigan Sangha, a sitting and dharma-study group on the Central Michigan University campus. He has recently retired from professional teaching, but continues to pay monthly pastoral visits to a Buddhist inmate at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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Ritoku is a Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy and Religion having received said degree in 1993 from the California Institute of Integral Studies. From Indiana University he has earned a B.A. in Philosophy and a M.S. in Philosophy of Education. His undergraduate interest was Non-Western perspectives on Western Thought, those perspectives being Eastern Thought and indigenous philosophies such as may be found among Native Americans. He is of Cherokee descent and grew up with an interest in Native American culture. He has been active in the Native American Church, and has been educated in several forms of Native American religions. In 1988 he taught at the Rough Rock Demonstration School in the Navajo Nation. This school was the first Native-American-run school with a cross-cultural curriculum that included Navajo culture, language and religion. After this he served in the Peace Corps teaching philosophy and social science at the National University of Samoa.
When living in San Francisco Ritoku entered Zen practice at the Zen Center of San Francisco. He became a member of the Hartford Street Zen Center, which is affiliated with the Zen Center of San Francisco. The Hartford Street Zen Center is both a Zen Temple and a hospice, and as part of his Zen training he worked with issues of death and dying. After he received his Ph.D, he became a resident scholar at the Zen Center of Los Angeles studying under Maezumi Roshi. He lived two years there after which Okumura Roshi ordained him as a novice. Ritoku's current interests include cross-cultural philosophies, philosophical psychology of religion, Asian and American Indian philosophies and religions. He is on the associate faculty in the Philosophy Department and the Native American and Indigenous Studies program at Indiana University School of Liberal Arts. He has taught: Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Environmental Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Buddhist Philosophy, Philosophies of China, American Indian Philosophies, and a variety of courses on Non-Western Philosophies. He has a book published: Primal Way and the Pathology of Civilization. |
Practice leader on the IU campus, Getting Started in Zen Practice facilitator,
Monday morning doshi, Thursday morning jikido/doan. Dōju grew up in the Washington D.C. area. He received a Bachelor of Arts in German studies from the College of William and Mary and a Master of Science in evolutionary biology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. While pursuing a Ph.D in biology, he began to feel dissatisfied with his direction and panicked at the thought of having no viable alternative. In 2011 he found himself at the Missouri Zen Center in St. Louis in the process of figuring out how to cope with this problem. There he practiced with Rosan Yoshida and found that through his zazen practice he was content to go with the flow and not worry so much about the future. Upon reading Kōshō Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought and finding its presentation of Zen to be the most clear and straightforward he had encountered, in 2015 he moved to Sanshinji in Bloomington, with the aim of becoming a priest under Uchiyama’s disciple, Okumura Rōshi. Dōju was ordained as a novice priest in 2017. Unable to fully abandon academia, the following year he accepted an offer to begin a master’s program in religious studies (Japanese Buddhism) at Indiana University. |
Sewing teacher
Yuko started to practice zazen when she was 16 and later went to Komazawa University to study Buddhism. During her time there, she had an opportunity to learn nyoho-e style sewing. She received lay precepts from Kin-ei Otogawa Zenji at Sojiji in Japan in 1977. After being married to Shohaku Okumura in 1983, she lived at Antaiji for one year to study okesa sewing. Since Sanshinji's establishment in Bloomington, she has been helping lay people to sew their rakusu and ordained people to sew their okesa. In 2018 she led an online kesa study group where she shared the English translation of the book Study of Kesa by Kyuma Echu. |
Tuesday and Friday morning jikido/doan
In traditional American fashion, Mark came to Buddhism through a book, The Razor's Edge. He couldn't let go of the question of why Larry burned his books on the mountain top. He took refuge at the Karna Thegsum Choling Dallas with Lama Dudjom Dorjee under the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism in 2006. In 2007 he moved to his native home of Bloomington-Normal Illinois and joined the Bloomington-Normal Zen Group (The Dharma Wind Zen Center), which he eventually ran for about five years. There he met and took precepts with Zuiko Redding at Jikyouji in Cedar Rapids (2010). He took a job with IU as a Database Administrator in 2015, and started practicing at Sanshinji. There he tries to balance work-life and and zen-life and usually laughs at the idea -- as if there is a difference! |