Philip Kapleau
The mid-twentieth century saw a wave of Americans turning toward Zen Buddhism, bringing Eastern contemplative traditions into contact with Western culture in ways that had rarely been attempted before. Philip Kapleau was born in New Haven on August 12, 1912, and went on to become one of the figures working within that crosscurrent.
Before his involvement with Zen, Kapleau worked as a journalist and a lawyer, occupations that placed him in professional settings shaped by argument, evidence, and the careful use of language. He later became a writer as well, working in English throughout his career. These earlier roles were not incidental — moving between law, journalism, and writing gave him a grounding in how ideas are framed and communicated, skills that would carry forward into his later life. He was also a poet, adding yet another register to the range of forms through which he engaged with language.
Kapleau was an American citizen, and much of his work unfolded within that national context even as it reached well beyond it. His independent lineage — the network of teachers whose practice traces back through his own training — spread across a remarkable range of countries. Teachers connected to that lineage were active in the United States and Canada, and also in Costa Rica, Mexico, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand. That geographic spread points to the reach of the transmission he was part of, extending across multiple continents and into communities that differed substantially from one another in culture and language.
Kapleau died on May 6, 2004, in Rochester. The breadth of the independent lineage he left behind — spanning teachers on several continents — stands as a concrete marker of the scope his work achieved over the course of his life. Whether measured by the number of countries where his lineage took root or by the range of professional identities he held before and during his engagement with Zen, his biography resists easy summary. What the record shows is a man who moved through law, journalism, poetry, and writing, and whose influence, in the form of an active teaching lineage, was still being carried forward well beyond his death.
Quotes by Philip Kapleau
The uniqueness of zazen lies in this: that the mind is freed from bondage to all thought forms, visions, objects, and imaginings, however sacred or elevating, and brought to a state of absolute emptiness, from which alone it may one day perceive its own true nature, or the nature of the universe.
To put the flesh of an animal into one’s belly makes one an accessory after the fact of its slaughter, simply because if cows, pigs, sheep, fowl, and fish, to mention the most common, were not eaten they would not be killed.
For the ordinary man, whose mind is a checkerboard of criss-crossing reflections, opinions, and prejudices, bare attention is virtually impossible.
Although we all possess the seeds of great love and compassion, without the light of the enlightened one’s wisdom and the waters of their compassion these seeds would never spout.
If you fall into poverty, live that way without grumbling – then your poverty will not burden you. Likewise, if you are rich, live with your riches. All this is the functioning of Buddha-nature. In short, Buddha-nature has the quality of infinite adaptability.
Every individual who eats flesh food, whether an animal is killed expressely for him or not, is supporting the trade of slaughtering and contributing to the violent deaths of harmless animals.
Many have come to realization simply by listening to the tinkling of a bell or some other sound.
You yourself are time- your body, your mind, the objects around you. Plunge into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the course of the currents.
To suppress the grief, the pain, is to condemn oneself to a living death. Living fully means feeling fully; it means becoming completely one with what you are experiencing and not holding it at arm’s length.