Uniting Life of the Spirit, Life of the Streets

In a New York neighborhood whose commanding view of the Hudson River adds natural beauty to an otherwise glum array of boarded buildings and littered streets, a new, American-style Buddhism is blossoming, fed by the bitterness of inner-city grit and the sweetness of chocolate brownies.

It’s a Buddhism based on the hybrid vision of Roshi Bernard Tetsugen Glassman, a Zen dynamo who combines the life of the spirit with the life of the streets.

For Glassman--who leads Zen communities in New York and Los Angeles--individual enlightenment and societal well-being are inseparable.

He is both a high-ranking Zen priest and an entrepreneur whose Greystone Bakery produces the key ingredient in Ben & Jerry’s Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream. The bakery’s profits sparked the growth of the Greystone Foundation, Glassman’s burgeoning network of institutions providing apartments, jobs, community gardens, day care and medical assistance to AIDS sufferers, street people, ex-drug addicts, single mothers and others facing tough times in Yonkers.

Glassman’s goal is to make the dependent self-sufficient by offering comprehensive services that elevate the spirit while providing basic material needs.

“My understanding of Zen is it’s just a state of mind,” said Glassman, 58. “Zen is a way of living life in a non-dualistic manner; having a moment-to-moment sense that whatever you’re doing in that moment is the spiritual life.”

Glassman’s approach has been labeled “engaged Buddhism,” a melding of American-style liberal social action with traditional Buddhism’s emphasis on compassionate living and the interconnectedness of creation.

He is among a number of prominent Buddhist leaders to mix social action with individual spiritual growth. Indeed, many Americans attracted to Buddhism in recent years have a history of 1960s-style social and political involvement. Leading foreign Buddhists--including Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama of Tibet--also emphasized this approach.

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What sets apart Glassman--one of the most senior Zen teachers in the United States--is the degree to which he has made activism the organizing principle of his primary spiritual home, the Peacemaker Order based in Yonkers, a city of 200,000 north of New York.

He also jets monthly to California, where he is now the abbot of the Zen Center of Los Angeles, one of the nation’s oldest Zen communities. Glassman, who took over as abbot after the 1995 death of Maezumi Roshi, has not yet put in place the same activist agenda in Los Angeles.

But Ed Kenzan Levin, chief administrator of the Los Angeles center, said he expects similar efforts in the future.

“Bernie has been commuting on a monthly basis. His energy is very transformative energy,” Levin said. “Wherever he goes, things change.”

Glassman’s newest undertaking is his fledgling Peacemaker Order, successor to the Zen Community of New York. He calls the order the “container” for training Buddhist priests and others to follow in his footsteps. Eventually, Glassman hopes to establish a network of “peacemaker villages” around the world in areas of conflict and societal instability.

Another embryonic project is his House of One People, an attempt to create interfaith “exchanges” that Glassman hopes will eventually produce an interfaith seminary teaching “peacemaking” from a variety of religious perspectives.

Glassman--who comes from a politically left, religiously traditional New York Jewish background--first became involved with Zen Buddhism as a student at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, where he earned an aeronautical engineering degree.

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He lived on an Israeli kibbutz and worked for McDonnell-Douglas in Los Angeles before becoming a monk in the Soto Zen tradition in 1970. Six years later, he quit his job to devote himself full time to Zen practice. Three years after that, he returned to New York to start a Zen community. From the beginning, Glassman said, he envisioned a Zen community that integrated economic viability with spirituality and social activism.

“I wanted to reach a larger group of people than just those who visit a Buddhist temple or are attracted to zazen [traditional Zen sitting meditation],” he said. “My vision was to reach people from all walks of life, from every social class.

The first step toward realizing his goal was starting Greystone Bakery, which began in 1982 as a means of livelihood for Zen Community of New York monks. Before long it became the cornerstone of the Greystone Foundation, the network of not-for-profit and for-profit agencies Glassman established to realize his activist goals.

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Richard Halevy, director of public affairs for the city of Yonkers, called Greystone “a fine example of a non-government entity becoming a partner in the community and providing the community with what it is not adequately receiving any other way.”

While the bakery employs about 50 people and turns a handsome profit--annual sales total about $3 million--Greystone Foundation needs long ago outstripped what seed money cakes and brownies could provide.

For example, the foundation is spending $10 million to turn a former Roman Catholic monastery in Yonkers into 35 one-room apartments for homeless people with HIV and AIDS. The two-acre site is the first permanent home for poor AIDS patients in Westchester County. Adult and child day-care facilities, a holistic health center and an interfaith chapel are also part of the project.

Federal, state, county and city bonds and grants are largely paying for the project, along with loans and gifts.

Just blocks from the monastery project, Greystone is spending an additional $3.4 million to turn a formerly derelict structure into 22 apartments for homeless families living on public assistance. A day-care center--charging as little as $2 per child per week--shares the site.

“The goal is to wean [homeless people] away from needing help and making them self-sufficient,” said Carol Gerstein, Greystone’s director of development and community relations.

“We provide job counseling and job training. We’ll get them jobs at the bakery or at Pamsula [a new Greystone business that recycles used fabric remnants into hand-stitched clothing, quilts and other items]. We’re also tied in with other community agencies, so what we can’t provide we send them elsewhere for.”

Unlike in its early days, most members of Greystone’s current staff--each of whom gets $300 per semester for schooling--are not Buddhists. And many who are Buddhist identify with a form of the religion other than Zen. At Greystone, Zen Buddhism, rather than being an overt presence, has become more a subtle working philosophy.

That approach has prompted some grumbling in Buddhist circles that Glassman has subordinated his responsibility as a spiritual leader to his zeal for social activism.

Havanpola Ratansara, Los Angeles-based executive president of the American Buddhist Congress, a national body encompassing nine Buddhist traditions, dismissed such complaints as “the comments of those living in the past.”

Buddhism, said Ratansara, has always adapted itself to the culture of its host country. In contemporary America, Buddhism has an obligation to “not hide in the monastery, but be in the streets.”