Gerry Shishin Wick

Gerry Shishin Wick (支芯, born 1943) is an American Sōtō Zen teacher, scientist, and author, and one of the twelve formal dharma heirs of Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Trained as a physicist, Wick earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and worked for years as a research oceanographer before devoting himself full-time to Zen — an unusual scientific pedigree that continues to colour his teaching style and his interest in the dialogue between Zen and the natural sciences. He undertook some twenty-four years of monastic and lay training under three Japanese teachers — Shunryū Suzuki Roshi at the San Francisco Zen Center, Sōchū Suzuki Roshi at Ryūtaku-ji in Mishima, and finally Maezumi Roshi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles — before receiving both dharma transmission (shihō) and the precept transmission (denkai) from Maezumi in 1990. He was acknowledged as a roshi by the White Plum Asanga in 2000 and served as the organisation's president from 2007 to 2014, a period in which the Asanga was working through the institutional aftermath of the Merzel affair^[1].

In 1996, Wick founded the Great Mountain Zen Center, a residential training community on the Colorado Front Range at Berthoud, where he and his dharma heir and partner Ilia Shinko Perez Roshi have led zazen, sesshin, and kōan study for nearly three decades. His most enduring contribution, however, is textual. With his elder dharma brother John Daido Loori he produced a complete English translation and commentary on the Shōyōroku — the thirteenth-century Sōtō kōan collection compiled by Hongzhi Zhengjue and Wansong Xingxiu — published as *The Book of Equanimity: Illuminating Classic Zen Koans* (Wisdom Publications, 2005). Together with the Hekiganroku and Mumonkan it is one of the three classical kōan anthologies of the Chan/Zen tradition, and Wick's edition has become one of the standard English working texts for both Sanbō-Kyōdan-style and Sōtō kōan curricula in the West^[2].

Alongside the Shōyōroku, Wick co-authored *The Great Heart Way: How to Heal Your Life and Find Self-Fulfillment* with Ilia Shinko Perez (Wisdom Publications, 2006), which presents a method developed at Great Mountain for working with what they call 'hidden emotional pain' inside the framework of Zen practice — a distinctive synthesis of kōan introspection and contemporary psychotherapeutic insight. Within the broader Maezumi lineage Wick is known for a quietly rigorous, scholarship-inflected style: he holds Maezumi's transmission of both the kōan curriculum and the precept lineage, has trained successors of his own through Great Mountain, and is regularly cited as one of the senior figures of the post-Maezumi White Plum generation^[3].