Bernie Glassman

Bernie Glassman (January 18, 1939 – November 4, 2018) was an American Zen Buddhist roshi and founder of the Zen Peacemakers (previously the Zen Community of New York), an organization established in 1980.

Bernie Glassman was born to Jewish immigrants in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, New York in 1939.

He attended university at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and received a degree in engineering.

Following graduation he moved to California to work as an aeronautical engineer at McDonnell-Douglas.

He then received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Glassman first encountered Zen when he was assigned Huston Smith's The Religions of Man for an English class in 1958.

From there, he continued reading including books by Alan Watts, Christmas Humphreys, and D.T. Suzuki.

In the early 1960s, Glassman began meditating and soon after sought a local Zen teacher.

He found Taizan Maezumi in Los Angeles, California and Glassman became one of the original founding members of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.

He received Dharma transmission in 1976 from Maezumi, who intended to create an inka shomei ceremony for him in 1995, shortly before Maezumi's death, conferring the influences of his own main teachers to Glassman.

In 1980, he founded the Zen Community of New York.

In 1982 Glassman opened Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, New York, which initially provided jobs for the Zen students and evolved into an effort to help alleviate the widespread homelessness in the area.

The bakery provided jobs for inner city residents who lacked education and skills.

Greyston employed low-skilled workers from the neighborhood, many of whom were homeless themselves, and sold baked goods to shops and restaurants in Manhattan.

In 1989 Glassman entered an agreement with Ben & Jerry's, and Greyston Bakery has become the supplier of brownies for several lines of ice cream.

In 1996, he co-founded the Zen Peacemaker Order with his late wife Sandra Jishu Holmes.

Glassman was a Dharma successor of the late Taizan Maezumi-roshi, and gave inka and Dharma transmission to several people.

Glassman was known as a pioneer of social enterprise, socially engaged Buddhism and "Bearing Witness Retreats" at Auschwitz and on the streets with homeless people.

He retired from the Greyston Foundation in 1996 to pursue socially engaged Buddhist projects through the Zen Peacemakers.

In 1996, Glassman, with his wife Sandra Jishu Holmes, founded the Zen Peacemaker Order.

According to professor Christopher S. Queen, "The order is based on three principles: plunging into the unknown, bearing witness to the pain and joy of the world, and a commitment to heal oneself and the world."

Richard Hughes Seager writes, "The Zen Peacemaker Order...has the potential to rival Thich Nhat Hanh's groups and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship as a force in American activism."

In the 2000s, Glassman developed an experiment in sociocratic consensus-based zen training and interfaith facilitation, known initially as Peacemaker Circle International, and later Zen Peacemaker Circles.

Interconnected projects were established globally, replacing the role of 'Zen teacher' with participants learning from each other and sharing ideas between Circles.

Starting in 2001, Glassman taught "Clowning Your Zen" workshops with Moshe Cohen, and founded a "clown order" called the Order of Disorder within the Zen Peacemaker Order.

In his last years, having disrobed from the priesthood, Glassman together with his third wife Eve Marko continued the work of his teacher Koryu Osaka Roshi in developing lay forms of Zen practice.

In 2003 the bakery moved to a new building, which allows for higher output and more employment opportunities.

As of 2004 the Foundation had developed $35 million worth in real estate development projects in Westchester County, New York.

The Foundation offers HIV/AIDS programs, provides job training and housing, child care services, educational opportunities, and other endeavors.

According to author James Ishmael Ford, in 2006 he "...transferred his leadership of the White Plum Asanga to his Dharma brother Merzel Roshi and has formally 'disrobed,' renouncing priesthood in favor of serving as a lay teacher."

In 2012, Bernie Glassman founded The Stone Soup Cafe in Greenfield, MA (originally the "Let All Eat Cafe" in Montague, MA) together with Academy-Award-winning actor Jeff Bridges, his Zen student.

Bernie and Jeff were really into making people feel welcome and providing access to dignified treatment and making their meal experience one where they felt cared for, not rushed, and fed body, mind, and soul.

The Stone Soup Cafe is inspired by the Zen Peacemakers' three tenets, which are to start with a mind of not knowing, letting go of fixed ideas so that you can bear witness to the joy and suffering around you, and then to do the actions that come out of that bearing witness.

The Stone Soup Café still operates today as a Pay-What-You-Can Café - a mixed-income restaurant experience that brings people together, bridging across differences.

Through the success of his bakery–which in 2016 was earning $12 million in revenues–Glassman founded the Greyston Foundation (sometimes called Greyston Mandala) with his wife Sandra Jishu Holmes in 1989.

Glassman died on November 4, 2018, from complications of a stroke in Springfield, Massachusetts at the age of 79.

Glassman taught about what his teacher, the late Taizan Maezumi, called the "unknowing."

Not-knowing is the first tenet of the Zen Peacemakers, and Glassman said of it, "In Zen the words source and essence are the equivalent of Unknowing, and they come up again and again. We have the absolute and the relative perspectives about life, and Unknowing is the one source of both of these."

Also, Glassman was known for his many "street retreats."

Author James Ishmael Ford writes, "...'street retreats,' for instance, moves sesshin into the streets: participants eat in soup kitchens, and, if they know they're not displacing homeless people, sleep in homeless shelters or, otherwise, sleep in public places. Zazen takes place in parks."