The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment
Rochester, New York · 1965
P
Philip Kapleau
Philip Kapleau
1912 CE–2004 CE · Modern · New Haven, CT
1912–2004 CE
Philip Kapleau (1912–2004) was an American Zen teacher who helped plant Zen practice in the United States as a living tradition rather than an academic subject. After encountering postwar Japan and serving as a war-crimes-tribunal court reporter, he trained for over a decade under Japanese Sōtō and Rinzai masters, especially Yasutani Hakuun. His 1965 book 'The Three Pillars of Zen,' presenting actual meditation instruction and accounts of awakening, became a foundational text for Western practitioners, and in 1966 he founded the Rochester Zen Center, adapting liturgy and training for an English-speaking sangha. He is well documented.
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Stop 1 of 2Born
New Haven, CTניו הייבןConnecticut, USA
What they did here
Born in New Haven; worked as a court reporter, including as chief Allied reporter at the postwar Nuremberg and Tokyo war-crimes tribunals, which drew him toward Zen.
About New Haven, CT
New Haven is a coastal city in Connecticut, United States, founded in 1638 by English Puritans as one of America's first planned towns. The Collegiate School moved there in 1716 and was soon renamed Yale. The theologian Jonathan Edwards graduated from it in 1720, and the city long remained a centre of New England Congregationalism. In 1863 Yale awarded the first American doctorate in engineering to the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, a New Haven native. Later Jewish immigration left a lasting mark on the city, which had a yeshiva by the twentieth century, and the Zen teacher Philip Kapleau was born there.
Across the traditions, in New Haven, CT at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Philip Kapleau’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Philip Kapleau’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.