Katagiri Roshi was born in Osaka, Japan in 1928 and died in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 1, 1990. In the decades between, he became one of the most quietly influential figures in the transmission of Zen Buddhism to the West.
Katagiri Roshi was ordained as a Zen monk by Daicho Hayashi Roshi, Abbot of Taizo-in, and later entered Eiheiji Zen Monastery — one of the two head monasteries of the Soto school — where he trained for three years under Eko Hashimoto Roshi. Following his monastic training, he pursued formal academic study at Komazawa University in Japan, completing both undergraduate and graduate study in Buddhism.
He was then assigned by the Soto Zen International office to serve the Japanese congregation in Los Angeles. In 1965, he moved to San Francisco to study English and assist Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in establishing the San Francisco Zen Center, a community that would become a cornerstone of American Zen. In December of 1972, he accepted an invitation to come to Minneapolis, where he founded the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center — and where he would spend the remainder of his life teaching with characteristic warmth, depth, and precision.
Four books of Katagiri Roshi's lectures have been published by Shambhala Press: Returning to Silence, You Have to Say Something, Each Moment Is the Universe, and The Light That Shines Through Infinity. Together they offer an enduring record of his teaching voice and vision.
Karagiri Roshi had a vision of establishing a traditional Soto Zen teaching monastery in the Midwest for the training of American priests. Throughout his life, he held a deep reverence for what he called the Ancient Ways* — the traditional forms and rhythms of monastic practice as they had been passed down through generations. He believed that modern people, increasingly insulated from nature and dependent on artificial environments, had much to learn from these ways.
In one of his last lectures, delivered in 1989 at Daijoji Monastery in Japan, he said:
"I wish to build a place and an environment to promote the quiet sangha life in unity . . . to practice the Way revering the Old Ways*. I think that the mode of old ways reveals the modern one from a different aspect. Modern life is artificially protected. When the artificial environment collapses, for instance in a natural disaster or an economic calamity, people suffer severely. Modern people, therefore, need to live in direct contact with nature and find a practice method in tune with nature's rhythm. Old ways of life fit this purpose. Such a life will put the modern life in a different perspective and teach us how we should live. Therefore, I am convinced we must build such a practice place in America."
He had expressed this longing simply and directly years earlier as well: "Sooner or later, I want to have a monastery.” (Returning to Silence, p. 115.)
Ryumonji Zen Monastery was founded on this vision.
*Ancient Ways refers to Zen Master Eihei Dogen's 13th-century poem, "Yearning for the Ancient Ways":
The Way of the Ancestors' coming from the West
I transmit to the East
earning for the ancient ways,
Catching the moon, cultivating the clouds,
Untouched by worldly dust fluttering about
A thatched hut, snowy evening, deep mountain.
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