About BoWZ
Boundless Way Zen Teachers
Boundless Way Zen has three guiding teachers; Melissa Myozen Blacker, Roshi, David Dae An Rynick, Roshi and Dharma Holder Alan Richardson. Melissa Myozen Blacker, Roshi is a Dharma heir to James Myo’un Ford, Roshi. David Dae An Rynick, Roshi is a Dharma successor to Zen Master George Bomun Bowman. Zen Master Bowman, who in addition to being a Dharma successor to Zen Master Seung Sahn has trained extensively in the Japanese Rinzai tradition with Kyozan Joshu Sasaki, Roshi. Dharma Holder Alan Richardson received Dharma Entrustment from his primary teacher, David Rynick, Roshi in 2021, becoming a Dharma Holder in the Boundless Way Zen tradition. For more information on the Guiding teachers and our emeritus teachers, please visit the BoWZ Teachers page.
The Lineages of Boundless Way Zen
The Zen way is just beginning to be established in the west. The first generation of western teachers includes those pioneers who traveled east and brought their precious gifts home, and those Asian missionary teachers, eccentric and often brilliant, who left their homes and made their life work here in the west. When these teachers came to the west, however, they couldn’t bring everything that existed in the east. This western Zen was a new enterprise, and to unduly tie it to the cultural patterns of the east would not only limit its accessibility to us in the west, the support systems of the institutional sanghas of the east simply could not be transplanted across the seas. Here, there is no system or culture of support for those who might wish to devote their lives to the practice and preservation of the Dharma.
So these early teachers brought a bare minimum. They brought the disciplines of shikantaza and koan study. They brought the ordination forms of the traditional transmission, including that central facet of the transmission: the personal acknowledgement of a teacher, what we call Dharma transmission. They expressed an ancient connection, one joining us, their Dharma heirs, to them, and back through them to the ancestors of our way. To look at a document like the Zen lineage chart is to catch a sense of what this means.
There is no doubt, the Zen lineage chart is an impressive document. In the chart that follows we find the traditional line of teacher and student ranging from Gautama Siddhartha, who lived more than twenty-five hundred years ago in the foothills of the Himalayas, to the teachers of the Boundless Way Zen school in North America. Depending on which sub-line one counts, this lineage chart traces between eighty and eighty-five generations of teachers following down from the Buddha.
Through its different teachers Boundless Way Zen combines Soto and Rinzai, Japanese and Korean lineages. All Zen lineages begin mythically in India, and historically in China.
Fierce Lotus 