Brooklyn Zen Center

Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC) is an embodied training community in the Soto Zen tradition. We aspire to offer opportunities to realize personal and collective liberation through the cultivation of intimate, ethical, and just relationship with ourselves and all beings. Our vow to practice undoing harmful and oppressive conditioning compassionately transforms our world.

Founded in 2005 as the first Zen Center in Shunryu Suzuki’s lineage in New York, BZC embraces both the Soto Zen tradition as well as socially engaged practice in an American context. BZC has grown rapidly to become one of the most dynamic Zen centers in the country, and operates two temples: Boundless Mind Temple (BMT), an urban practice space which shares space at Christ Church Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and Ancestral Heart Temple (AHT), a residential training center in Millerton, New York. Ancestral Heart is the first training temple in Suzuki Roshi’s U.S. lineage in the Northeast, and runs the public-facing Millerton Zendo.