Our teacher is Shojo Joy Brennan. Raised in Wooster and Lakewood, Ohio, Joy first encountered Soto Zen practice as a child through her parents, who were students of Sojun Diane Martin of Illinois. Joy began training with Sojun Diane in January of 2008 at Udumbara Zen Center in Evanston, IL. She received lay ordination in December 2009, priest ordination in July 2017, and dharma transmission in July 2022. In addition to her formal training at Udumbara, her path of practice has also included a three-month residential practice period at the San Francisco Zen Center in fall 2011 and a three-week intensive SPOT (Shogaku Priest Ongoing Training) seminar on priest training and teacher ethics at Empty Nest Zendo in North Fork, California in summer 2015.

In addition to her dedicated work at KZC, Joy is a teacher and scholar of Buddhist studies. As a student, she lived in China for two years where she studied modern Chinese, classical Chinese, and Chinese religion and philosophy. She received an MA in Religious Studies from Indiana University Bloomington, where in addition to Chinese Buddhism she began to study Sanskrit and the Indian Buddhist philosophical tradition. She continued studying Chinese and Indian Buddhist philosophy, as well as major thinkers in the study of religion, at the University of Chicago Divinity School, from which she received a PhD in 2015. She now teaches Buddhism and the religions of East Asia at Kenyon College, and publishes on topics in Buddhist thought, with a particular focus on the Yogacara school. You can learn more about her teaching and writing here.

Like Zen schools everywhere, KZC’s teachings and practices come to us from our Zen ancestors, which includes our teachers and our teachers’ teachers, extending all the way back to the historical founder of the Buddhist tradition, Shakyamuni Buddha. The figures listed here include Shojo Joy’s teacher, Sojun Diane Martin, as well as Sojun Diane’s two teachers, Shogaku Shunryu Suzuki and Jikai Dainin Katagiri. At Kokosing Zen Center, each of us and all of us together also include in our lineages any ancestor whose path has made ours possible. That includes ancestors who struggled to make better lives for us, ancestors who gained wisdom that we have learned from, and ancestors whose suffering we work to alleviate with our own practice and our commitment to build a better world for all beings.