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In 2009, the Zen Peacemaker Order will open the first Zen Houses, a new model of residential Buddhist training devoted to socially engaged Buddhism. These Houses offer a new turning of the Wheel of the Dharma, integrating social action and Buddhist practice through direct community service, emphasizing the transformation of the individual and society.
Zen Houses will be located in impoverished urban and rural areas. They will develop services, such as free meals, to help meet the needs of this community. The first Zen House will be located in Appalachia, and provide job opportunities in a depressed rural region.
Zen Houses will serve three goals: to train residential and community based Buddhist practitioners and interns in the theory and skills essential to practice socially engaged Buddhism; to provide new and varied models for this practice; and to help alleviate suffering in the world by developing and running social service projects in areas of need. Zen Houses will be community based and will not seek to proselytize or convert, but to serve beleaguered people of any race, religion, orientation and gender where they live, work and struggle daily.
Zen Houses will embody Buddha Dharma by delivering services from a holistic, dignity based perspective in skill building, empowerment models, well linked to networks of existing service agencies. The administration of the Houses and the Dharma training there will be based on the perspectives of the Five Buddha Families, taking into account spiritual practice, service, learning to access and maintain financial and physical resources, opening various avenues for communication, and continuing education. Zen Houses will uphold the Bodhisattva Vow to save all creation by giving that vow tangible force, here and now, whether in the gritty, decaying environs of squalid inner cities, or in the vast, isolated rural heartlands abandoned by time and industry.
Zen Houses will offer regular meditation and dharma teachings for residents and the public from the perspective of socially engaged Buddhism, that is compassionate and skillful service centered in the oneness of all creation. Each Dharma House will have a kitchen a meditation hall, sleeping accommodations for residential practitioners and guest quarters for the homeless, people in crisis, interns, and traveling dharma practitioners and social activists. Each Dharma House will develop its own social service projects and structure its programs, schedules and staffing to meet the particular needs of the community being served.
Daily life in a Zen House will be communal, and include scheduled periods of meditation, study, physical practice and service in the projects sponsored by the House. The supervision and training offered at the House will be supplemented by advanced workshops and retreats offered at the Maezumi Institute, the study and training center of the Zen Peacemakers at their Mother House in Montague, Massachusetts.
The concept for the Dharma Houses originated with Roshi
Bernie Glassman's efforts, beginning in 1980 at the Zen Community of
New York, to found and develop what became the Greyston Mandala, a network of for-profit and not-for-profit community development companies working in the inner city of Yonkers, New York. To this day, the Greyston Mandala uses the perspectives of the Five Buddha Families to administer a nested set of social services and businesses to lift homeless people out of poverty. Their model includes housing for individuals and families, job skill training, and directly related employment, child care provisions and family counseling as necessary, an AIDS residence and a state licensed clinic for HIV treatment.
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