The Zen Eye: A Collection of Zen Talks
New York City · 1993
S
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki)
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki)
1882 CE–1945 CE · Modern · New York City
March 10, 1882 – May 17, 1945
Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki, 1882–1945) was a Japanese Rinzai teacher who founded one of the earliest Zen organizations in the United States. After first arriving in America in 1906 with his teacher Sōkatsu Shaku and receiving authorization to teach in 1924, he established the Buddhist Society of America—now the First Zen Institute of America—in New York City in 1930. He was among the first Japanese masters to live and teach Zen in America. Interned briefly during World War II, he died in 1945 shortly after marrying Ruth Fuller Everett (later Ruth Fuller Sasaki).
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →
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Stop 1 of 1Visited
New York CityUnited States
What they did here
In 1930 founded the Buddhist Society of America (now the First Zen Institute of America), one of the earliest Zen institutions in the U.S.
About New York City
New York City, in the US state of New York, began as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in the 1620s, was renamed by the English in 1664, and took its present five-borough form in 1898. Its universities, Columbia among them (founded 1754), made it a major centre of science and scholarship; B. R. Ambedkar earned his doctorate in economics at Columbia. Union Theological Seminary, founded in 1836, counted Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its faculty and hosted Dietrich Bonhoeffer as a fellow in 1930, and the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky also worked in the city. In 1930 Sokei-an founded what became the First Zen Institute of America there, an early landmark of Buddhism in the United States.
In New York City at the same time
B. R. Ambedkar, Alan Watts, Pema Chödrön, Robert Thurman, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Across the traditions, in New York City at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki)’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
B. R. Ambedkar, Alan Watts, Pema Chödrön, Robert Thurman, Jon Kabat-Zinn
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Sokei-an (Shigetsu Sasaki)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.