Sunya Kjolhede and Lawson Sachter, ordained Dharma heirs of Roshi Philip Kapleau, are the co-founders and teachers of Windhorse Zen Community. Both Lawson and Sunya have been practicing Zen for 40 years, and have conducted sesshins and workshops in the United States, Mexico, and abroad.
Sunya, along with her other teaching activities, travels regularly to Poland, where she serves as spiritual director of the Bodhidharma Zen Center, a Polish Zen community founded by Roshi Kapleau in 1975. She has trained in Clinical Pastoral Education, working for a period of time as hospital chaplain, and she has also worked as a professional storyteller.
Lawson is spiritual director of the Clear Water Zen Center in Florida, and conducts several sesshins there each year. He is also a licensed psychotherapist with a private practice in Asheville, NC. During the early 1990's he began training in short-term dynamic psychotherapy techniques, and since that time has worked as a therapist with a wide range of clients, including many who practice meditation. Much of his personal and professional work has centered on the integration of Eastern and Western approaches to intrapsychic change.
Sunya and Lawson are married and have four grown children and two grandchildren.
Roshi Philip Kapleau, author of The Three Pillars of Zen and founder of the Rochester Zen Center in upstate New York, died on May 6, 2004 from complications of Parkinson's disease. He died in the sunlit garden of the Zen Center surrounded by his students, family, and friends.
Philip Kapleau was born in 1912 to a working class family in New Haven, Connecticut. As a young man he studied law and became a court reporter, serving for many years in the state and federal courts of Connecticut. He recorded trials of increasing importance and was selected in 1945 to serve as chief court reporter for the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and later covered the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Months of recording the minutiae of the atrocities of World War II affected him deeply and awakened a spiritual longing that shaped the remainder of his life.
While in Japan he became interested in Zen Buddhism and sought out Dr. D.T. Suzuki and other Zen teachers. Returning to New York in 1950, he studied Buddhist philosophy with Dr. Suzuki, who was then teaching at Columbia University, but a purely intellectual approach did not satisfy his desire for a deeper understanding. In 1953 he sold his court reporting business and moved to a Zen Buddhist monastery in Japan.
Philip Kapleau spent the next thirteen years undergoing rigorous Zen training under three Japanese Zen masters before being ordained by Hakuun Yasutani Roshi in 1965. During this time he put his writing and court reporter skills to work, transcribing Zen teachers' talks, interviewing lay students and monks, and recording the practical details of Zen Buddhist practice. He was the first Westerner allowed to observe and record dokusan, the private interviews between a Zen teacher and student. The resulting book, The Three Pillars of Zen, was published in 1965 and quickly became the standard introductory text on Zen practice. It is still in print and has been translated into twelve languages.
During Philip Kapleau's book tour in 1965 Dorris Carlson, wife of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, invited him to visit her small meditation group in Rochester, New York. In June 1966, with the support of the Carlsons, he founded the Rochester Zen Center.
In addition to The Three Pillars of Zen, Kapleau's other books include The Zen of Living and Dying, Zen: Merging of East and West, To Cherish All Life, Awakening to Zen, and Straight to the Heart of Zen.
