Taking the Zen Garland Order Vows – Study
Time:
A new study group will begin in January 2025
Students will be guided to sew their own rakusu.
With Roshi Paul Genki Kahn and Roshi Monika Genmitsu Kahn
Practicing the Zen Garland Order Vows means to embody Zen ethics as a way to salvation, healing, and liberation. The Vows are an essential element in the practice path of all Buddhist traditions: precepts, meditation, and wisdom. Taking the Zen Garland Vows is the commitment to enter the Zen Buddhist path and the initiation into the Zen Garland Order family of Zen Buddhism.
This empowerment is open to those with a regular steady practice under the guidance of a Zen Garland Order Teacher. Prior Buddhist, and specifically Zen, practice experience, can be considered as contributing to this requirement. The practitioner requests of their teacher to take the Zen Garland Order Vows.
Once accepted, the practitioner joins a training group that studies the history, philosophy, and dynamics of precepts and vows in Buddhist, Zen, and the Zen Garland Order traditions. A rakusu, the miniature version of a monk or nun’s robe, is sewn by each practitioner with help from their sewing mentor. A ceremony is held where they receive the Zen Garland Order as ongoing ways of practice from their Teacher.
One of the leading Zen masters of our time, Roshi Paul Genki Kahn augments traditional Zen practices with modern psychology, philosophy, science, and socially engaged service to marginalized communities. He has developed a thorough and profound holistic approach to Zen practice that offers personal and inter-relational development for skillful living in the world. He is Co-founder with his wife, Roshi Monka Genmitsu Kahn, of the International Zen Garland Order. Along with his duties as the Spiritual Director of the Zen Garland Order and the Ancient Oaks Zen Community, Roshi Genki maintains a private psychotherapy practice in Savannah.
Roshi Genmitsu is a Zen Master Teacher and Zen Buddhist Priest. Together with her husband Roshi Paul Genki Kahn she is the co-founder of the Zen Garland Order, the Ancient Oaks Zen Community and the Practice of Zen Focusing. Originally a Swiss mountaineer she is also the lineage holder in Zen Garland’s Red Path Zen trained and transmitted by Grandfather Shook Sings-Alone Roshi.
Genmitsu works as a professional Compassionate Bereavement Care Counselor and Family Services Coordinator for the MISS Foundation and the Selah Carefarm, providing services and aid to traumatically bereaved families in their difficult grieving process.
