Renshin Bunce

Steve Stücky and Renshin Bunce

Myogen Steve Stücky and Renshin Bunce

Cuke Podcast with Renshin 🔊

Photo and part of her bio from her website: renshinbunce.com/company

In midlife, yearning for a peaceful mind, I began meditating. I met my teacher Myogen Steve Stücky in January of 1994. I made jukai (took my lay vows) with Myogen at Dharma Eye Zen Center in 1996, was priest ordained by Zenkei Blanche Hartman at San Francisco Zen Center in 2003, served as Shuso (head student) with Myogen at Tassajara in 2008, and received dharma transmission from him at Tassajara in April of 2013....

Her books:

Simplicity Zen Podcast: An Interview with Renshin Bunce

On YouTube: Mission Hospice Author Series: Renshin Bunce, Love and Fear - Stories from a Hospice Chaplain

See her many photos on Flickr. Some albums of note:

I graduated from San Francisco State in 1964. My college roommate was leaving San Francisco, so I left our apartment in the Haight and found a darling place for myself on Bush near Laguna. It was the back half of a Victorian with a fireplace and a skylight, and it was fully furnished because the previous occupants had been carted off to jail. Their scrambled eggs still sat on the kitchen table and someone had written “darling it’s raining” in descending script on the side of the refrigerator. There was an outside staircase that everyone used, climbing into the living room through the window. It was really cheap.

My neighbor who I shared the outside staircase with was kind of a strange guy. I didn’t hang out with him. But once I guess we were chatting because he told me that the big building across the street was a Zen Center, and there was a Japanese priest there who was teaching Zen. He said I could go over there. I asked him what Zen was. He said, “It’s a way of ending desire.” I was 21 years old, just getting into my groove with desire and a few other things as the Summer of Love approached, and that didn’t sound interesting to me. And that’s why I never met Suzuki Roshi. All I had to do was walk across the street, and I didn’t.

My neighbor, I realized many years later, was misinformed. Zen must be a way of learning to live with desire, not end it.

       -       Renshin Bunce 

Renshin Bunce   Renshin Bunce

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