Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice
Los Angeles, CA · 2001
T
Taizan Maezumi
Taizan Maezumi
1931 CE–1995 CE · Modern · Los Angeles, CA
February 24, 1931 – May 15, 1995
Taizan Maezumi (1931–1995) was a Japanese Zen teacher who held lineage in the Sōtō, Rinzai, and Sanbō Kyōdan traditions and became a major force in American Zen. He established the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967 and founded the White Plum lineage, training a large number of Western successors—including Bernie Glassman and Charlotte Joko Beck—who went on to lead their own communities. His teaching combined Sōtō 'just sitting' with Rinzai kōan work. His later years at the Zen Center of Los Angeles were also marked by acknowledged struggles with alcohol and by controversy over relationships with students. He died in 1995.
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Los Angeles, CACalifornia, USA
What they did here
Established the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967 and trained many American successors.
About Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles, in Southern California, is the second most populous city in the United States. It was founded as a Spanish pueblo in 1781 on the site of the Tongva village of Yaanga, passed to Mexico after 1821 and to the United States in 1848, and was incorporated in 1850. Its Jewish community dates to the 1860s, when the congregation now known as Wilshire Boulevard Temple was founded, and Los Angeles County today has the second-largest Jewish population in the country. The city was also an early centre of American Zen: Nyogen Senzaki opened a meditation hall there in the 1930s, and Taizan Maezumi founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles in 1967.
In Los Angeles, CA at the same time
Across the traditions, in Los Angeles, CA at the same time
In the same place & time
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Sages whose lives overlapped with Taizan Maezumi’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
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Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Taizan Maezumi’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.