Bernie Glassman
Zen Master (Roshi) Bernie Glassman passed away on November 4, 2018. He was a world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen Movement. He was a spiritual leader, published author, accomplished academic and successful businessman with a PhD in Applied Mathematics. Bernie taught and traveled, giving talks and workshops on spiritual practice, socially responsible business and international peacemaking. He is the founder and Vision Holder of the Zen Peacemaker Order.
Roshi Bernie Glassman is a remarkable teacher and human being. I have enormous respect for him, and his contribution to peace and healing in the world. His work has had a profound impact on me. This book is an excellent presentation of Zen teachings, see through the lens of Bernie's experiences and perspectives as a peacemaker. Directed by William Crain. With David Soul, Paul Michael Glaser, Antonio Fargas, Bernie Hamilton. Hutch's girlfriend is a drug kingpin's moll attempting to start a new life. Bernie Glassman Master - Zen Master Bernie Glassman is a world-renowned pioneer in the American Zen Movement. He is a spiritual leader, published author, accomplished academic and successful.
Personal and Education
Bernie Glassman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1939. His parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and he grew up in a Jewish family with a strong socialist orientation. After graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, he went to work for McDonnell-Douglas in California in 1960 as an aeronautical engineer, concentrating on interplanetary flights. He also obtained a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA in 1970. Currently Bernie has two grown children and four grandchildren.
Zen Training and Teaching
In 1967, Bernie began his Zen studies with Taizan Hakuyu Maezumi Roshi, Founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He became a Zen teacher--Sensei Glassman--in 1976. In 1980 he founded his own Zen Community of New York in the Bronx, New York. He started the Greyston Bakery, at first staffed by Zen students, as a livelihood for the Community, and then made it a vehicle for social enterprise in Yonkers, 3 miles north (see below). In 1995 Bernie Glassman received inka, or the final seal of approval, from his teacher and became known as Roshi Glassman. During that year and in 1996 he served as Spiritual Head of the White Plum Lineage, comprising hundreds of Zen groups and centers in the US, Latin America and Europe, as well as the first President of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association of America. His Dharma Family includes dharma teachers, zen priests, zen preceptors, zen entrepreneurs, Christian clergy, Rabbis, Sufi Sheiks and multi-faith peacemakers.
Social Enterprise
Bernie became a social entrepreneur in 1982, articulating a vision that socially responsible businesses can have a double bottom line: generating profits and serving the community. The Greyston Bakery was the first such venture, but it was merely one piece of a larger socially responsible business model which he developed, known as the Greyston Mandala (the Sanskrit mandala can be loosely translated as circle of life), a network of for-profits and not-for-profits working together to improve the lives of individuals and the larger inner city community of southwest Yonkers. Greyston, which celebrates its 33th anniversary on June 11, 2015 provides permanent housing, jobs, job training, child care, after-school programs and a host of other supportive services to a large community of formerly homeless families, advancing the principles of empowerment, empathy, and responsible action. Its main components are:
Greyston Bakery. Founded in 1982 in the southwest corner of Yonkers, a poor neighborhood beset by high unemployment, violence and drugs, the bakery began to hire people that conventional businesses had deemed unemployable It trained its employees in bakery crafts and soon they were producing some of New York's most expensive, high-end cakes and tarts sold in the city's fanciest eateries. In 1990 it began to produce brownies for Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream and its revenues shot up dramatically. Since its humble founding, the bakery has grown (2015) into a successful $12 million business with around 100 employees. Its hiring remains to this very day 'First come, first served,' and much of its profits are recycled into seed money for its sister not-for-profits, thus making the entire network more sustainable and financially independent.
Greyston Family Inn. This is Greyston's housing and support services arm. Since 1986 it has developed hundreds of low-cost permanent apartments for homeless families, for folks with AIDs, a large child care center, and tenant support services as well as after-school programs, providing wraparound support to families trying to come out of the cycle of unemployment, homelessness, and public assistance.
Maitri Center and Issan House. Opened in 1997, Maitri is a medical center serving 150 people with AIDS-related illnesses. It was among the first facilities in the country to provide alternative care therapies to people with HIV/AIDS. Issan House provides housing for many of Maitri's patients.
The entire Greyston Mandala (as of 2015) hires around 200 people and serves at least 2000 men, women and children annually in southwest Yonkers. Its model of integrating for-profits, not-for-profits, and spirituality has been studied by many other nonprofits and cities across the country as well as in universities. Bernie Glassman served as Founder and President/CEO of Greyston from 1982 till he left it in 1996.
Spiritually-Based Social Action and Peacemaking
In January of 1994, while leading a bearing witness retreat in Washington, DC, on the occasion of his 55th birthday, Bernie decided to create the Zen Peacemaker Order, for Zen practitioners dedicated to the cause of peace and social justice. Subsequently, the concept was broadened to become an international, interfaith network called the Peacemaker Community, stressing the integration of spiritual practice and social action through Three Tenets:
Not-knowing, thereby giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe;
Bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world; and
Doing the Actions that arise out of Not-Knowing and Bearing Witness League of legends download free for mactreeal.
Together with his wife and co-founder, Sandra Jishu Holmes, Bernie left Greyston in the end of 1996 and became President of this large community of spiritually-based activists. He took a leave when his wife died in 1998, but from 2000 till 2004 he continued serving as President, devoting his energy to developing the Peacemaker Community and supporting various social action and peacemaking projects in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States. This organization is now known as the Zen Peacemaker Order.
In 2004 Bernie Glassman began to develop a training campus to teach people the skills of spiritually-based social enterprise and peacemaking called the Maezumi Institute, in Western Massachusetts. In addition, he began to look into new opportunities for social enterprise programs, During 2005 he tried to develop such programs in partnership with local not-for-profits in Greenfield and Turners Falls.
Awards
Bernie was awarded the Ethics in Action Award by the Ethical Culture Society of Westchester and the E-chievement Award by Toms of Maine. He was named Man of the Year by the Westchester Coalition of Food Pantries and Social Entrepreneur of the Year by Business Week in 1993. He was a founding board member of the Social Ventures Network, a network of businesses committed to social change, and continues to serve as one of its spiritual leaders.
Publications
Bernie is the co-author, with Rick Fields, of Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Masters Lessons in Living a Life that Matters (Bell Tower, April 1996), and the author of Bearing Witness: A Zen Masters Lessons in Making Peace (Bell Tower, May 1997) and Infinite Circle: Studies in Zen (Shambhala Publication, 2002. He is also the co-author, with Jeff Bridges, of The Dude and The Zen Master (Penguin, Jan 2014).
Bernie Glassman, one of the most important American Buddhist teachers, died Sunday November 4 at the age of 79. His life, and his integration of Judaism and Buddhism, now stands as a perfect, imperfect monument to the pursuit of spirituality and social justice. Volle konvertieren unternehmen serial key.
Minecraft hide and seek map download. Perhaps fittingly, Glassman passed away just as one of the organizations he founded, Zen Peacemakers, was on its way to Auschwitz for its 23rd annual Bearing Witness retreat, which brings between 50 and 100 participants – often spiritual teachers themselves – to see Auschwitz for themselves and confront the radical evil of the holocaust.
The Bearing Witness program reflects many of Glassman’s own values: Jewish history and identity, the pursuit of social justice (this year, as always, a focus of the program is how xenophobia and anti-Semitism continue to manifest today), intensive Buddhist spiritual practice, and, in a sense, the audacity of confronting life as directly and fully as possible.
Born in Brighton Beach to Jewish immigrants, Glassman had a twenty-year career in technology. As a young man, he lived on a kibbutz in Israel and taught at the Technion. Later, he got a PhD in applied mathematics from UCLA and worked as an aeronautical engineer.
All the while, Glassman was pursuing serious Zen study. For fifteen years, he was a student of Maezumi Roshi, one of the most important (and scandal-ridden) figures in the transmission of Buddhism to the West and the founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Glassman received “transmission” (authorization to teach) from Maezumi Roshi and moved back to New York to found the Zen Community of New York in 1979.
Almost immediately, Glassman’s approach to Zen belied the mistaken claim that intensive spiritual practice is somehow detached from the political and social world. (The colloquial sense of “Zen” as relaxing and self-indulgent is the diametrical opposite of actual Zen.) He started a bakery in the Yonkers that went on to employ economically disadvantaged people and teach them valuable skills. He conducted “street retreats” in which participants lived among the homeless and practiced meditation in public parks. And, in 1996, he co-founded Zen Peacemakers.
Together with Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and organizations like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Glassman was one of the most important figures in “Engaged Buddhism,” which applies Buddhist teachings to what many Jews call tikkun olam, the project of ‘repairing’ the brokenness in the world.
Bernie Glassman Roshi
Engaged Buddhism is a new phenomenon, but it has old roots; an essential prerequisite for any serious Buddhist study are the ethical components of the Eightfold Path, which include not only personal moral obligations such as not harming others, but also what are today political moral obligations such as making one’s livelihood in an ethical way.
Like much of 20th and 21st century Western Buddhism, Glassman’s Engaged Buddhism is also disproportionately Jewish. Many of Glassman’s leading students were Jewish by birth and by ethos. (Glassman’s parents were not notably political but many uncles and aunts were left-wing radicals in the 1930s, 40s and 50s.) While Engaged Buddhism draws on Buddhist teachings, it obviously also reflects the social and historical context of American Jewish liberalism.
But Glassman went even farther than that. Again contrary to the clichés one often hears about “JuBus,” or Jewish Buddhists, Glassman remained closely engaged with Jewish tradition throughout his life. Even as a Zen priest – Glassman was a priest as well as a teacher until 1997, when he ‘disrobed’ and focused entirely on Zen Peacemaker work – he remained a Jew until the end, with his sense of humor, his (quiet) outrage at injustice, and, of course, the annual trips to Auschwitz.
“Bernie was a bridge between worlds,” Rabbi Shir Yaakov Feit, first a participant and now a facilitator of the Bearing Witness Auschwitz retreat, told me via instant message from Poland. “Always experimenting at the edges, hybridizing ancient wisdoms with modern.”
Glassman’s tireless social justice work will likely be his most enduring contribution to American Buddhism, and perhaps American religion in general. Having worked with prison populations, AIDS patients, and homeless people, Glassman focused in his last years on international work, leading missions and retreats in Rwanda, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, Palestine, and Native American lands, among other places.
The purpose of the Auschwitz and other ‘Bearing Witness’ retreats was simple on its face: to confront evil directly, not flinch from it, and commit to fighting it. As one of Glassman’s students, Natalie Goldberg, put it, “If we look evil in the face, we will know it and not run from it.” But to actually integrate the impact of Auschwitz into daily life and action, to pursue peace in one’s own life and one’s own politics – that is not so simple.
Shoshana Cooper, a leading Jewish meditation teacher (and teacher of mine) who went with Glassman on several Bearing Witness retreats, told me that Glassman “was my first teacher on the path of disillusionment, the stripping away of the illusions we like to create to make the world feel safe and lovely.”
“He was instrumental,” she continued, “in teaching me to face the worst of humanity and to learn slowly how to open to that horror in my heart, mind and body. Bearing Witness taught me to face everything I may hate and then to live better, differently, more whole and hopefully wiser than before I faced and integrated the brokenness of our humanity.”
Bernie Glassman Zen
Glassman suffered a debilitating stroke in 2016, and the recovery was long and painful. At the same time, he also experienced a number of profound meditative states as his mind, trapped in a non-functioning body, was able to be free from thoughts and emotions and simply rest in a state of “not-knowing.”
Bernie Glassman
One of his students asked him about these states on a video conference call in 2017, after Glassman had recovered enough to conduct them. He replied as best he could, but at one point, according to his now-widow, Eve Marko, his eyes teared up and he refused to answer any more questions about profound mind states and meditation.
Bernard Glassman
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The real question is what does this have to do with being a mensch, a human being? If we can’t answer that, what are we doing?”