Zen Center of Los Angeles

The Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), temple name Buddha Essence Temple, is a Zen center founded by Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi in 1967 that practices in the White Plum lineage.

ZCLA observes a daily schedule of zazen, Buddhist services, and work practice. The Center's programs include introductory classes, sesshin, workshops and training periods, as well as face-to-face meetings with Abbot Wendy Egyoku Nakao and other Center teachers. The sangha practices zazen and koan training in the Maezumi-Glassman lineage.

ZCLA's mission is to know the Self, maintain the precepts, and serve others. The Center serves by providing the teaching, training, and transmission of Zen Buddhism. ZCLA's vision is an enlightened world in which suffering is transcended, all beings live in harmony, everyone has enough, deep wisdom is realized, and compassion flows unhindered.

Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, zen, center, los and/or angeles:

    Just because you live in LA it doesn’t mean you have to dress that way.
    —Advertising billboard campaign in Los Angeles, mounted by New York fashion house Charivari.

    Zen ... does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.
    Alan Watts (1915–1973)

    Louise Bryant: I’m sorry if you don’t believe in mutual independence and free love and respect.
    Eugene O’Neill: Don’t give me a lot of parlor socialism that you learned in the village. If you were mine, I wouldn’t share you with anybody or anything. It would be just you and me. You’d be at the center of it all. You know it would feel a lot more like love than being left alone with your work.
    Warren Beatty (b. 1937)

    Just because you live in LA it doesn’t mean you have to dress that way.
    —Advertising billboard campaign in Los Angeles, mounted by New York fashion house Charivari.

    Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
    Joan Didion (b. 1935)