Taizan Maezumi

For those of you who care, this tradition that I teach from comes from a woman named Charlotte Joko Beck.

And what she saw is that her teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, who grew up and trained in Japan and came and founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles, was obviously a person of deep insight, deep practice, had had profound experiences of emptiness and of the sort of, the emptiness of the self and just, you know, all of that, and yet was not very knowledgeable, so to speak, about the kind of psychological patterns I was just talking about.

and so would at one moment be like the most open present loving a person you could imagine and then other moments would be like kind of in the corner drinking you know or like you know um mistreating his wife or things like that and instead of saying oh he was just a charlatan he wasn't i think what she says no no the the practice and the insight were really the practice and the experience of emptiness were genuine and deep But he didn't pay enough attention to the psychological patterns that were also part of his experience.

And so they would catch him up.

I see it as a kind of enriching, complementing.

So anyway, Joko Beck was profoundly influential and has really had a profound influence on all strands of American Buddhism.

I think she was one of the first American-born teachers in a traditional Asian lineage who said we need to pay more attention to psychology.

So anyway, a little bit of historical background to why I teach in this way.