![]() They rotated from one follower’s apartment to the next, learning to sit and meditate. Within weeks, Shimano had an enthusiastic sangha of perhaps several dozen novices, who met daily for zazen. ![]() And that was the beginning of the sangha.” “And every single day I picked up two or three people who were curious. “Little by little, every single day, I walked entire Manhattan,” Shimano told me in his still-fractured English. Before long, he had a small space to host meditation sessions, and all were invited. Now and again, somebody asked to tag along. It was a kind of Buddhism, he told the curious New Yorkers. ‘What are you doing? Where are you going?’ So I said, ‘I am from Japan and doing zazen practice’”-Zen meditation. “And all I did was simply walk Manhattan from top to the bottom. “It was the middle of the 1960s, full of energy,” Shimano recalled when we met for lunch last year. He did this, at first, by walking the streets of New York. Not long after he arrived-the very next day, according to some versions of the story-he began to build his sangha, his Zen community. ![]() ![]() Before flying east, he had been offered temporary lodging by a couple who lived on Central Park West. Besides his clothes, he brought with him only a small statue of the Buddha and a keisaku, the wooden stick a Zen teacher uses to thwack students whose posture sags during meditation. He was 32 years old, and although he had just spent four years in Hawaii, part of the time as a university student, his English was poor. ![]() Kennedy International Airport on December 31, 1964, New Year’s Eve. “That was the beginning of the sangha”Įido Shimano, a Zen Buddhist monk from Japan, arrived at New York’s John F. ![]()
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