Dear friends,
always on and around 18th January, we are celebrating the birthday of our beloved teacher Bernie Glasman. I feel happy to present you two testimonies:
- A video, made by two of the guiding teachers of the zen peacemaker community: Geoff Schoun O’Keeffe, Jim Hoden Fricker. Please, enjoy their conversation:
https://voice.zenpeacemakers.org/p/bernie-glassman-sixty-years-of-practice
This episode of the Peacemakers Podcast features reflections from Bernie Glassman, drawn from a three-day gathering held in 2014.
Across those days, Bernie occasionally spoke from the vantage point of the first, second, and third twenty-year periods of his life — not as a formal structure, but as a way of noticing how practice matures through time. What comes through most clearly is not biography, but how the Three Tenets — Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Action — continually shaped his responses to life.
Listening now, these reflections feel less like a retrospective and more like an invitation. The Three Tenets are not presented as ideas to adopt, but as something already moving in each of us — in how we meet uncertainty, stay with what is difficult, and allow action to arise from real presence.
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2. An essay, written by Christopher Starbucks, who one day, some years ago, approached me by saying he wished to authorize me as a Dharmaholder of zenpeacemaker circles. During that time we used to have a vivid communication among zenpeacemakers, which made it possible to get to know each other quite well, although we had not met each other personally. I was surprised and gladly consented.
Bernie Glassman and the Peacemaker Circles – by Christopher Starbucks
The Peacemaker Circle approach was created by the late zen teacher Bernie Tetsugen Glassman as an alternative or complement to traditional zen training. He envisaged circles of people from different cultures and religions coming together and supporting each other to live compassionate and socially active lives using a core set of simple zen practices and ways of thinking, extended beyond their Buddhist origins to be of service to all.
He worked on the Peacemaker Circles between around 2000-2012, establishing the core practices and roles for eldership and support of the circles based on a non-hierarchical approach, close to the early Buddhist sangha and wider models such as Quaker-type decision making – reaching decisions by informed consent or consensus.
After 2012 as he became older, he stepped back into a more supporting role for the many strands of practice he had established: traditional teacher-led zen communities, egalitarian Peacemaker Circles, social businesses, the Zen Peacemaker International network, etc. He passed away in 2018 leaving an extraordinary varied and energetic legacy of people and practices to continue the work he had established.
Peacemaker Circles as Indra’s Net
There is a memorable image much loved in the zen tradition, of a net of jewels belonging to Indra, an early Zeus-like deity from India. The jewels in this net were arranged so that each jewel reflects and is reflected in every other, so that not only the jewels themselves but also the reflections within them too multiply into infinity. The image is used in many schools of Buddhism to suggest how everyone and everything is inter-related – “interbeing” as the Vietnamese zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh called it.
It’s also how Bernie conceived of the Peacemaker Circle – each participant in a circle reflects every other, and every circle interconnects with all the others. In this way there is no need for overall leaders or teachers in this approach – instead, everyone in their own capacity serves at different times and different contexts to support, lead, teach and inspire each other.
The Medicine Bag of Circle Tools and Teachings
What holds a Peacemaker Circle together, beyond the cooperation and goodwill of its participants, is a shared collection of tools Bernie gathered together from his own experience and his students. He offered them not as beliefs or exclusive means, but as a way to allow different people to join together, listen and learn from each other, and support each other’s compassionate action in the wider world.
There are many tools in the Peacemaker Circles, but most foundational are:
- The Three Tenets – Bernie’s encapsulation of the whole zen outlook as ‘Not Knowing’, ‘Bearing Witness’, and ‘Loving Action‘.
- Council Circle – the practice of deep listening though ceremonial circles to listen and speak from the heart, received originally from the Native American Iroquios people.
- Zazen – silent zen meditation, taught in a way accessible to and harmonious with other contemplative traditions.
- The Five Buddha Energies – a simple, widely applicable model for wholeness in life and community.
- Decision making by ‘Informed Consent’ – ideally true consensus, but where that is not possible, for all members of a circle to willingly consent to a decision, even if it might not be their own preferred choice.
At the same time as maintaining these communal practices, Peacemaker Circles are encouraged and empowered to develop new tools to suit local needs, and for members of circles to learn about and appreciate each other’s spiritual practices from whichever tradition or religion they originate.
The Supreme Meal
The Supreme Meal is our own life, seen as a whole and offered with compassion. We use whatever ingredients we have, in whatever situation we find ourselves, to cook the finest and most nourishing ‚meal‘ for those who come within the circle of our loving engagement with the world.