Bernie Tetsugen Glassman

Bernie Tetsugen Glassman (哲玄, January 18, 1939 – November 4, 2018) was born in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He took an engineering degree from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from UCLA, and worked as an aeronautical engineer at McDonnell-Douglas — including on an early Mars-mission feasibility study — before turning fully to Zen. He had first encountered Zen in 1958 through Huston Smith's *The Religions of Man*, and in Los Angeles in the late 1960s he became one of the founding students of Taizan Maezumi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. He received dharma transmission from Maezumi in 1976 as Maezumi's first American heir, and in 1979 he and his teacher informally conceived the White Plum Asanga that would gather Maezumi's later successors^[1].

In 1980 Glassman moved east and founded the Zen Community of New York in Riverdale, then in Yonkers, where he set out to build what he called a Greyston Mandala — an interlocking set of social enterprises rooted in Zen practice. Greyston Bakery, opened in 1982, adopted an open-hiring policy that eventually supplied brownies to Ben & Jerry's; the Greyston Foundation followed in 1989 and grew to operate permanent supportive housing, an HIV/AIDS services arm, child-care, and job-training programs for residents of southwest Yonkers. In 1996, with his second wife Sandra Jishu Holmes, Glassman founded the Zen Peacemaker Order, which he later restructured as Zen Peacemakers International. The order is organised around three tenets — not-knowing, bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world, and taking action that arises from not-knowing and bearing witness — enacted through street retreats among the homeless and the long-running Bearing Witness Retreat at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial^[2].

Glassman's books frame the contemplative ground of that engaged work. *Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life That Matters* (with Rick Fields, Bell Tower, 1996) reads Dōgen's *Tenzo Kyōkun* as a manual for social entrepreneurship; *Bearing Witness: A Zen Master's Lessons in Making Peace* (Bell Tower, 1998) sets out the three-tenet method through the Auschwitz retreats; *Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen* (Shambhala, 2002) collects his commentaries on the Heart Sutra, the Identity of Relative and Absolute, and the bodhisattva precepts; *The Dude and the Zen Master* (Blue Rider, 2013), co-written with Jeff Bridges, became his most widely read title. He gave dharma transmission to a substantial succession that includes Eve Marko, Pat Enkyo O'Hara, Wendy Egyoku Nakao, Paco Lugovina, and Roshi Joan Halifax (parallel to her transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh), all of whom carry Zen Peacemakers' engaged-practice emphasis. Glassman died on November 4, 2018, in Springfield, Massachusetts, from complications of a stroke he had suffered two years earlier^[3].