American Zen Association
無 峰 山 廣 川 寺
Peakless Mountain Shoreless River Temple
STONE NEST DOJO, SEWANEE NEW ORLEANS ZEN TEMPLE
STONE NEST DOJO, SEWANEE ZEN, opened its doors in April 2023.
The ascent to the fourth-floor dojo at 748 Camp Street, former home to the New Orleans Zen Temple (1991-2021).
On September 18, 2022, we closed the dojo at 3600 Napoleon Avenue, which has been home of the New Orleans Zen Temple since July 2020. We returned temporarily to the second floor of 748 Camp Street.
On January 1, 2023, the new dojo of the New Orleans Zen Temple opened at 8338 Oak Street, on the second floor above Yes, Yoga.
Our Story
Founded in 1983 by the late Robert Livingston Roshi (1933-2021), the American Zen Association provides Zen training and practice in the tradition of Master Taisen Deshimaru.
American Zen Association is also known by its temple name, Muhozan Kozenji: Peakless Mountain Shoreless River Temple. Our two main temples are aptly located in the mountains of Tennessee and on the Mississippi River. However, our monks direct dojos across the country, from Bakersfield to Brooklyn.
After the death of Deshimaru, Robert Livingston returned to the U.S. from Paris and operated several dojos in Uptown New Orleans during the 1980s. The New Orleans Zen Temple opened in 1991 in a historic building at 748 Camp Street in the Arts District, built in 1831 and once the site of Cosimo Matassa's Jazz City recording studio. For the next thirty years, those who wanted a taste of Zen climbed the slate and heart pine stairs to the dojo.
At the death of Robert Livingston in early 2021, the Temple relocated to the Broadmoor neighborhood at 3600 Napoleon Avenue. This location closed September 18, 2022.
On January 1, 2023, the New Orleans Zen Temple reopened its doors at its new location, 8338 Oak Street, on the second floor, above Yes, Yoga.
Richard Reishin Collins, second abbot since 2016, currently resides in Sewanee, Tennessee, where he directs Stone Nest Dojo and oversees the operations of the extended sangha of the American Zen Association. He returns to New Orleans periodically to teach at the Oak Street location.
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Sewanee Zen and the New Orleans Zen Temple are overseen by the American Zen Association, a 501c3 nonprofit organization incorporated in Louisiana. All donations are tax deductible.
Our Board of Directors consists of Richard Collins, Executive Director and President; Gary Enns, Vice President; Robert Savage, Treasurer/Secretary; Laura Fine, Advising Counsel; and Virginia Barnes, Jeff Cantin, and Lana Matthews Sain.
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ScheduleS:
We are currently open for in-person zazen.
SOme ZAZEN SITTINGS are also offered on Zoom. EMAIL US FOR LOGIN if you have had an introduction.
if you have NOT attended an introduction, you can register by emailing us at noZTINFO@gmail.com (NEw orleans) or nozentemple@gmail.com (sewanee).
NEW ORLEANS ZEN TEMPLE
Tuesday: 7:00 PM
Thursday: 6:30 AM
Sunday: 10:00 AM
STONE NEST DOJO, SEWANEE
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. 7:00 AM
Sunday: 10:00 AM
Locations
American Zen Association
Stone Nest Dojo 岩巣 , Sewanee
3818 Sherwood Rd
Sewanee, TN 37375
Phone +1 318 451-3418
nozentemple@gmail.com (for inquiries about Zen practice in Sewanee, and for inquiries about membership, donations, publications, messages to the Abbot, etc.).
New Orleans Zen Temple
8338 Oak Street, 2nd Floor
New Orleans, LA 70118
noztinfo@gmail.com (for all inquiries about Zen practice in New Orleans, including introductions and schedules.)
Contact Us
With any questions you have about practice, dates of retreats, and new student orientation.
Kodo Sawaki
Kodo Sawaki Roshi (1880-1965)
Kodo Sawaki, unlike other masters, refused to take charge of the monasteries offered him during his lifetime, and so he was called “Homeless Kodo.”
After an unhappy childhood as an orphan raised by a gambler uncle, Kodo ran away from home in search of a monastery that would take him. The Sino-Japanese War added to his traumas, including physical injuries that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Known as a scholar who derided the Buddhist scriptures as mere “footnotes” to zazen, Kodo Sawaki taught wherever he was welcome, from schools and universities to offices and prisons, from fishing villages to big cities. At his death at Antaiji in 1965, he was known as a great reformer in Japanese Soto Zen, one who brought back the importance of zazen as essential to Zen practice.
Today two statues, one of Kodo Sawaki and one of Taisen Deshimaru, stand at the entrance to the Buddhist University of Komazawa.
Taisen Deshimaru
Taisen Deshimaru Roshi (1914-1982)
Born in the Saga Prefecture of Kyushu in 1914 of an old Samurai family, Deshimaru’s father was a businessman and his mother a devout follower of the Buddhist Shinshu sect. Unlike Kodo Sawaki, Deshimaru had a happy childhood. He was nonetheless tormented by the ephemeral nature of life, its constant change, MUJO. Neither his mother’s Nembutsu, nor the promises of the Christian Bible satisfied him. Having met Master Kodo Sawaki early in his life, he eventually began to study and practice with him, asking him repeatedly for monastic ordination. For many years, Kodo discouraged him from taking monastic orders, encouraging him to gain more life experience instead of retreating into a monastery.
During World War II, Deshimaru spent time in Indonesia working for the arms manufacturer Mitsubishi, but before he left Japan he asked Kodo Sawaki for something to remember him by. Kodo Sawaki gave him his rakusu, which he kept until he returned to a defeated Japan as a prisoner of war. At last, after many years requesting that he be ordained, Deshimaru finally received his teacher’s blessing as Kodo Sawaki dragged himself out of his sickbed to make a new monk.
Deshimaru went on to establish the AZI (Association Zen Internationale) in France, and its retreat center, La Gendronniere in the Loire Valley. At his death he was recognized by the Sotoshu in Japan as the head teacher of Soto Zen for Europe. His legacy includes hundreds of dojos affiliated with AZI in Europe, Africa, and South America.
For an in-depth narrative of his eventful life before arriving in Paris to found the AZI, see his Autobiography of a Zen Monk (Hohm Press, 2022), translated by Richard Collins.
Robert Livingston
Robert Livingston Roshi (1933-2021), Founding abbot (1983-2016)
Born in New York City, Robert Livingston grew up in New York, California and Texas. At nineteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he worked as a carriage tour guide and associated with the jazz musicians, artists, and writers in the French Quarter. Drafted into the Army, he spent two years in Japan and Korea, returning to finish his degree in economics at Cornell University. After studying law at University of Texas, he worked briefly in a stock brokerage in Houston before deciding that he wanted nothing to do with what America had become: narrow-minded, Puritanical, xenophobic, conformist, and materialistic. He fled to Europe where he worked in a financial services corporation and tried his hand at a number of investment ventures, while living in Rome, Capri, Seville, and Paris.
While in Paris, he became a close disciple of Taisen Deshimaru, who had always intended to go to America before settling in France. Before his death in 1982, Deshimaru asked Robert to return to the United States and open a Zen dojo to transmit true Zen practice in the United States. Returning to New Orleans, where he had spent time as a young man, Livingston Roshi founded the American Zen Association in 1983 and opened the New Orleans Zen Temple at 748 Camp Street in 1991, where it remained for the next thirty years.
His death in 2021, five years after his retirement from active teaching in 2016, marked the end of an era. Robert Taikaku Reibin Livingston Zenji’s ashes are kept on the altar of Stone Nest Dojo, Sewanee.
Richard Collins
Passing the kotsu and hossu. Shiho. 2016.
RICHARD REISHIN COLLINS (b. 1952), ABBOT (since 2016)
Richard Collins was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1952. He grew up in Southern California and earned a BA in English with honors from the University of Oregon, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Irvine. He was a Fulbright scholar to London (1980-81), a Leverhulme Commonwealth/USA research fellow at the University of Swansea (1984-85), and a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Bucharest and Timisoara, Romania (1992-94). He has taught literature at several universities in the United States, as well as in Wales, Romania, and Bulgaria. At Xavier University of Louisiana he was RosaMary Endowed Professor of English and editor of the Xavier Review. In 2016, he retired from academia as Dean Emeritus at California State University, Bakersfield, where he led the School of Arts and Humanities for six years.
He began Zen practice with Robert Livingston in 2001, receiving monastic ordination in 2010 and permission to teach in 2012. With Livingston Roshi’s retirement in 2016, he received shiho and became the second Abbot of the New Orleans Zen Temple.
His Zen essays and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Alien Buddha Zine, Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought, Blue Unicorn, The Crank (UK), The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Exquisite Corpse, Littoral Magazine (UK), Marrow Magazine, MockingHeart Review, New Orleans Review, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, The Plenitudes, Poem Alone (UK), Religion and the Arts, Sagesses Bouddhistes (France), Shō Poetry Journal, Shot Glass, Synaeresis: art + poetry, Think Journal, Urthona: Buddhism and the Arts, Willows Wept Review, and Xavier Review.
His books include John Fante: A Literary Portrait (Guernica Editions, 2000) and No Fear Zen (Hohm Press, 2015). He has edited several books on Zen, including Deshimaru’s Mushotoku Mind: The Heart of the Heart Sutra (Hohm Press, 2012). His translation of Deshimaru’s Autobiography of a Zen Monk is available from Hohm Press (2022). His most recent book is a memoir, In Search of the Hermaphrodite (Tough Poets Press, 2024).
AMERICAN ZEN ASSOCIATION (headquarters)
Richard Collins, President
3818 Sherwood Rd
Sewanee, TN 37375
E-mail: nozentemple@gmail.com
www.americanzenassociation.org
TENNESSEE
STONE NEST DOJO, SEWANEE
Richard Collins, Director
3818 Sherwood Rd
Sewanee, TN 27275
318-451-3418
E-mail: nozentemple@gmail.com
www.americanzenassociation.org
LOUISIANA
NEW ORLEANS ZEN TEMPLE
Richard Collins, Abbot8338 Oak St, 2nd floor
New Orleans, LA 70118
E-mail: noztinfo@gmail.com
www.neworleanszentemple.orgZEN FELLOWSHIP OF ALEXANDRIA
Robert Savage, Director
1245 Elliott Street
Alexandria, LA 71301
(318) 730-8536
Email: info@zenalexandria.org
CALIFORNIA
ZEN FELLOWSHIP OF BAKERSFIELD — DUST BOWL DOJO
Gary Enns, DirectorBakersfield, CA 93301
Email: zen.fellowship@gmail.com
NEW YORK
MONJU-DO ZEN FELLOWSHIP
Malik Walker, Director
http://www.mazenfellowship.com/p/north-east-zen-association.html
COLORADO
WILD FOX ZENDO
Hobbie Regan
13186 W. Progress Cir., Apt 202,Littleton, CO
Email: hobbie@wildfoxzendo.org
ROBERT TAIKAKU REIBIN LIVINGSTON ROSHI
28 JANUARY 1933 - 2 JANUARY 2021
"HEAD PRESSES THE SKY”
