The Way of the Buddha

Shodo Harada Roshi is Abbot of Sogen-ji, a 300-year-old Rinzai Zen monastery in Okayama, Japan. He is also Abbot of Tahoma Monastery on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. He founded Enso House, a hospice affiliated with Tahoma, where his students attend the dying. He is a master of Japanese calligraphy, and has conducted demonstrations at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His translator and colleague, Priscilla Daichi Storandt, is co-abbot at Tahoma and a senior teacher in her own right. Find out more on his website.

Daichi Zenni is Abbot of Tahoma Zen Monastery and serves as Harada Roshi’s primary translator. After graduating from Ithaca College, at the time when she was  baking bread professionally, she recognized her deep interest in Japanese pottery and in Zen. Chance encounters brought her to Takayama to work as an apprentice to a potter. Throughout those years she maintained her hunger for Zen meditation. She began Zen training, first at Shofukuji, and since 1982, at Sogenji. Daichi Zenni has lived and practiced at Sogenji continuously. Harada Roshi instructed Chisan to begin to teach formally, holding sesshin at Tahoma and at Water Moon Dojo. She continues to do pottery.

Michael is the president and co-founder of Commonweal. His principal work at Commonweal is with the Cancer Help Program, CancerChoices.org, the Omega Resilience Projects, the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, and The New School at Commonweal. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983 and is author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Therapies (MIT Press).