Zen Peacemakers

The Zen Peacemakers is the principal continuing institutional carrier of the substantial American engaged-Zen tradition built by Bernie Glassman (1939–2018) across four decades. The organization was founded in 1996 by Bernie and his wife Jishu Holmes (1941–1998) as the Zen Peacemaker Order; after Jishu Holmes’s death and Bernie’s subsequent restructurings, the work has continued under the name Zen Peacemakers International through Roshi Eve Marko and a substantial network of subsequent students.

Bernie Glassman

Bernard Tetsugen Glassman was an unusually consequential figure in 20th-century American Zen. Born in [[brooklyn|Brooklyn]] in 1939 to a Jewish family, trained as an aeronautical engineer (PhD applied mathematics, UCLA; worked at McDonnell Douglas on the Mariner Mars probe), he encountered Zen practice in the 1960s and ordained as a monk under Taizan Maezumi Roshi at the [[echo-park|Los Angeles]] Zen Center — one of the foundational figures of postwar American Zen. Bernie received Dharma transmission in the White Plum lineage in 1976 and inka (final certification) in 1995.

After ordination he established the Zen Community of [[beacon-ny|New York]] at Greyston in Yonkers, NY in 1979 — the first major Zen center in the [[beacon-ny|New York]] area — and over the subsequent decades developed a substantially distinctive Zen practice integrating contemplative work with intensive social-economic engagement. His foundational projects:

• Greyston Bakery (founded 1982) — a Yonkers bakery operating on an open-hiring model: anyone who applies is hired, in the order they apply, with no resume, no interview, no background check. The bakery hires the formerly incarcerated, recovering addicts, the homeless, and others traditionally excluded from the labor market. The bakery’s continuing economic viability has substantially demonstrated that open-hiring can work as a sustainable business model. Greyston is the long-running brownie supplier to Ben & Jerry’s and now operates at substantial scale.
• The Greyston Mandala — the integrated network of housing (the substantial Maitri Center for AIDS patients, supportive housing for formerly homeless families), child-care (the substantial Greyston child-care programs), and economic development that grew from the bakery into a substantial Yonkers nonprofit infrastructure.
• Substantial homeless retreats on the streets of [[beacon-ny|New York]] and other cities, in which Zen practitioners spent days and nights living alongside the homeless population — substantially bearing witness to the conditions of the urban poor.
• The substantial Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreats, beginning in 1996, that became the principal continuing public practice of the Zen Peacemakers.

The Three Tenets

The foundational practice framework of the Zen Peacemakers — and Bernie Glassman’s principal continuing contribution to the broader engaged-Buddhist tradition — is the Three Tenets:

1. Not-knowing

The willingness to enter situations without predetermined views. The traditional articulation: giving up fixed ideas about ourselves and the universe. In practice: when entering a situation of substantial complexity (a meeting with a person whose situation is unfamiliar, a community whose history is contested, a place of substantial historical trauma), the practitioner deliberately sets aside their predetermined frameworks and remains open to what the situation actually presents. Not-knowing is not ignorance — it is the deliberate disciplinary practice of holding existing knowledge lightly enough that something new can be encountered.

2. Bearing witness

The practice of remaining present to the substantial suffering and joy of beings without turning away from either. The traditional articulation: bearing witness to the joy and suffering of the world. In practice: when in the presence of substantial suffering (sitting at the Auschwitz memorial, walking with the homeless, attending a community in grief), the practitioner does not analyze, does not theorize, does not offer immediate fixes — they simply remain present, with attention, allowing the situation to be fully encountered. Bearing witness is the practice of compassion as substantial presence rather than as response.

3. Taking action

The action that arises from not-knowing and bearing witness. The traditional articulation: taking action that arises from not-knowing and bearing witness. In practice: when not-knowing and bearing witness have been substantially established, action — the specific response to the specific situation — arises from the contact rather than from prior planning. The action may be small (offering a particular kindness, asking a particular question), substantial (founding a bakery on the open-hiring model), or absent (sometimes the response that arises is no action at all). What distinguishes Three-Tenets action from ordinary problem-solving is that it emerges from substantial contact rather than from the imposition of prior frameworks.

The Three Tenets have been substantially influential well beyond the Zen Peacemakers — they are now widely adopted as a contemplative-action framework in chaplaincy training, conflict resolution, restorative justice, and substantial parts of the broader contemplative-activist world.

The Auschwitz Bearing Witness Retreat

The principal continuing public practice of the Zen Peacemakers is the Bearing Witness Retreat at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial in Poland, held annually since 1996. The retreat structure:

• Five days at the memorial site (typically in early November)
• Participants from across religious and cultural backgrounds — Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, secular; descendants of survivors and descendants of perpetrators; Polish, German, Israeli, American, and substantial international participants
• Days spent walking the camp grounds, sitting in meditation at significant sites (the railway selection-platform, the gas chambers, the crematoria, the camp memorial), reciting the names of those murdered, and engaging in council process — small-group conversations in which each person speaks from their own experience without interruption or commentary
• Substantial integration with Jewish liturgy (kaddish prayers for the dead are recited daily) and inter-religious practice

The retreat has been one of the principal continuing engaged-Buddhist practices in any tradition. Approximately 100–150 participants attend each year; over the 30-year history, several thousand people have completed the retreat. The substantial practice of bringing together descendants of perpetrators and descendants of victims to bear witness to the place where their families’ histories intersected has produced substantial subsequent reconciliation and continuing relationship across what had been deeply contested lines.

Beyond Auschwitz, similar Bearing Witness Retreats have been held at sites of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, with Native American communities at sites of substantial historical violence, in Bosnia at sites of the 1990s ethnic-cleansing campaigns, and at substantial other sites of historical trauma worldwide.

Subsequent transformations

Bernie Glassman remained the principal teacher of the Zen Peacemakers until his stroke in 2016 and his death in 2018. The organization has subsequently been substantially restructured under his Dharma successors — particularly Roshi Eve Marko, Genro Gauntt, and substantial others — and continues to operate Bearing Witness Retreats, chaplaincy training, and engaged-Buddhist programming worldwide.

The substantial continuing influence of Bernie Glassman’s work — through Greyston, through the Three Tenets, through the Bearing Witness Retreat practice, through his substantial body of writing (Bearing Witness, Instructions to the Cook, Infinite Circle) — is one of the principal continuing American engaged-Buddhist legacies.

What it gives

A continuing institutional carrier of an unusually substantive American engaged-Buddhist tradition — the integration of contemplative practice with substantial economic-development work (Greyston), with bearing-witness practice at sites of historical trauma (Auschwitz, Rwanda, and others), and with chaplaincy and contemplative-activist training. The Three Tenets framework — not-knowing, bearing witness, taking action — which has been substantially adopted across the contemplative-activist world as one of the principal continuing contributions of the engaged-Buddhist tradition to broader social practice. And, through the Bearing Witness Retreats and the Greyston Mandala, substantial continuing demonstrations that Buddhist contemplative tradition can be the substrate of substantial sustained engagement with the actual conditions of the world’s suffering.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[zen]]
• Member of: [[organization]]
• Part of: [[engaged-buddhism]]