Philip Kapleau

Philip Kapleau (born Aug. 20, 1912, New Haven, Conn., U.S.—died May 6, 2004, Rochester, N.Y.) was an American religious leader, a leading popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the United States and the founder of the Rochester Zen Center, a major venue of Zen meditation and education.

During his youth Kapleau rejected his family’s Christianity, going so far as to found an atheists’ club at his high school. He later regarded his early atheism as the stirrings of a deep religious sensibility. With the outbreak of World War II, Kapleau received a medical deferment and worked in Connecticut as a court reporter. He was later a court reporter at the Nürnberg trials and at the trials of Japanese defendants conducted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo. It was in Tokyo that he was first exposed to East Asian cultures and religions.

During his stay in Japan, Kapleau developed an intense interest in Zen. After his return to the United States he attended lectures at Columbia University by D.T. Suzuki, an influential translator of Buddhist texts and interpreter of Zen thought. Kapleau traveled back to Japan in 1953 to study Zen, spending three years in the monastery of Harada Daiun-roshi (roshi, a Japanese term of respect meaning “master,” is bestowed upon Zen masters by their disciples) and subsequently becoming a student of Yasutani Haku’un-roshi. Kapleau received dharma transmission (the authority to instruct others in the practice of Buddhism) from Yasutani and was ordained a monk in 1961. He returned to the United States in 1965 to teach. That year he published The Three Pillars of Zen, a seminal work that has since been translated into several languages. The following year Kapleau founded the Rochester Zen Center, which became one of the major focal points of Zen education in America. He taught at the center for nearly four decades and died on its grounds.

Kapleau is known for adapting Zen practice to accommodate Western culture—e.g., by allowing practitioners to wear Western-style clothing during zazen (sitting meditation) and to chant sutras (discourses attributed to the Buddha and revered as scripture) in English rather than in Japanese. Yet he rejected the efforts of many contemporary practitioners and scholars who portrayed Zen as a philosophical system. He particularly argued against attempts by predominantly Christian scholars and religious practitioners to conflate Zen and theism (which Kapleau saw as inherently flawed). He viewed Zen less as an intellectual endeavour than as a way of life, stressing the centrality of practice (cultivating mindfulness through meditation) rather than of philosophy or theology. He was a teacher and mentor to several major figures in American Zen, including Bodhin Kjolhede, his successor at the Rochester Zen Center. In addition to The Three Pillars of Zen, Kapleau wrote or edited several works, including The Wheel of Death (1971), Zen: Dawn in the West (1979), To Cherish All Life (1981), and Straight to the Heart of Zen (2001).