ZEN TRAINING

A Zen Dojo is a place for deep spiritual training (shugyo in Japanese) for anyone who has a sincere desire to realize their True Self. We train rigorously using the traditional forms of Rinzai Zen, martial arts and fine arts. 

Zen is not an idea or belief. It is the moment by moment experience of the quality of your breathing, the penetrating effect of gravity on your muscles and bones, and the ways in which your senses create the world around you.

The test of our Zen training is not on the meditation cushion but under the extremes that life can bring to any of us. For us, compassion means to take away fear in those around us – any time and any place.

CANON

Train to heal the duality that creates suffering – the duality of mind and body, of self and other, of life and death.

Train with the intensity of shugyo, a resolve so strong that Tanouye Tenshinʻs “sword that gives life” is experienced.

Train through your senses, finding your realizations in muscle and bone, breath and gravity. Breath becomes the billowing black smoke pulsing from the chimney of the Chosei kiln. Gravity becomes the inevitability of a massive red oak, falling to earth for use as timber.

Train to know the unknown, alive in the cloud of unknowing.

HISTORY

Chosei Zen was founded in 1982 by Kenneth Setsuzan Kushner Roshi as a branch temple of Chozen-ji / International Zen Dojo in Madison, WI. Kushner Roshi incorporated training in hara development and kyudo (Zen archery) and emphasized a curriculum of zazen, martial arts, and fine arts.

In 2006, a rural Zen training center was established in Spring Green, WI by Gordon Hakuun Greene Roshi. While supervising the building of the Spring Green Dojo, Greene Roshi recognized how readily the hard work reinforced the breath and posture necessary for useful meditation, leading to a teaching emphasis on the manual labor of Zen meditation.

Both Kushner Roshi and Greene Roshi trained at Daihonzan Chozen-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple in Honolulu, and received inka shomei from Tenshin Tanouye Rotaishi. Tanouye Rotaishi was a Dharma heir of Omori Sogen Rotaishi in the Tenryu-ji lineage of Rinzai Zen.