A Living Lineage

Zen is handed down from one person to the next, warm hand to warm hand, across more than two thousand years. Our practice belongs to the Soto school, the tradition founded in thirteenth-century Japan by Eihei Dogen, who taught that just sitting is itself the expression of awakening.

In the last century, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi carried this tradition from Japan to California and founded the San Francisco Zen Center, whose teaching has since branched into communities across the country. One of those communities is the Chapel Hill Zen Center in North Carolina, led by Josho Pat Phelan, the only Soto temple in Suzuki Roshi’s lineage in the southeastern United States. Both of us sit and train there, and it is the practice we learned at Chapel Hill that we hope to offer here in the Upstate.

So the thread runs from the Buddha, through Bodhidharma and Dogen, to Suzuki Roshi and the San Francisco Zen Center, down through Chapel Hill to the cushions we set out on a Sunday morning in Greenville. We hold that inheritance with care.

The seal in our logo

The red seal beside our circle reads shikantaza, just sitting. It is the heart of Soto Zen, the practice Dogen received from his own teacher, and it names exactly what we gather to do.