Jan Chozen Bays

Jan Chozen Bays (長善, born 9 August 1945 in Chicago, Illinois) is an American Sōtō Zen teacher, pediatrician, and author — one of the twelve dharma heirs of Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi and the second woman to whom he gave transmission. By professional training a physician specialising in paediatrics, Bays spent much of her medical career as one of the United States' leading clinical experts on the medical evaluation of child abuse, conducting examinations of thousands of abused and murdered children and serving as an expert witness in court proceedings throughout the 1980s and 1990s — a body of work that continues to shape both her ethical voice as a teacher and her insistence on Zen as a practice of 'showing up' for suffering bodies in the actual world^[1].

She began Zen practice in San Diego in the early 1970s and in 1977 moved to the Zen Center of Los Angeles, where she trained intensively under Maezumi Roshi until his death in 1995. Maezumi gave her dharma transmission in 1983, making her his fourth dharma successor and one of the earliest American women authorised to teach in the Sōtō tradition. From 1985 she taught at the Zen Community of Oregon in Portland together with her husband Laren Hōgen Bays — also a Maezumi-line teacher — and in 2002 the two of them co-founded Great Vow Zen Monastery in Clatskanie, Oregon, on the wooded hills above the Columbia River, today one of the most active residential Sōtō training monasteries on the West Coast and a centre for long-form sesshin, monastic ango, and a Jizō practice associated with mourning and child-loss that Bays is particularly known for^[2].

Her published works occupy an unusual middle ground between formal Zen teaching and contemporary mind-body health writing, and have given her a much wider readership than most American Sōtō teachers. They include *Jizo Bodhisattva: Guardian of Children, Travelers, and Other Voyagers* (Shambhala, 2003), *Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food* (Shambhala, 2009), and *Mindfulness on the Go: Simple Meditation Practices You Can Do Anywhere* (Shambhala, 2014); *Mindful Eating* in particular helped to seed an entire clinical literature on mindfulness-based approaches to disordered eating. Her teaching emphasis — disciplined zazen and kōan practice, a strong monastic curriculum at Great Vow, and the explicit translation of Zen attention into the care of bodies, food, children, and the dying — represents a distinctive integration of Maezumi's lineage with the lived ethics of a paediatrician's career^[3].