Alan Senauke

Hozan Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest, folk musician and poet residing at the Berkeley Zen Center in Berkeley, California, where he currently serves as Vice Abbot. He is a former Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship , holding that position from 1991 to 2001. Alan also was a founder of Think Sangha, a group of writers and intellectuals that are affiliated with the BPF and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. Think Sangha is a group of individuals who meet together to identify some of the most pressing social issues that they feel engaged Buddhists should be addressing. Senauke, who was born to a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, arrived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1968 and soon started sitting at the Berkeley Zen Center. Along with his Dharma sister Maylie Scott, Senauke received Dharma transmission from his teacher Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1998 during a ceremony at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center.

Alan Senauke was born in 1947 to a secular Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York. While attending Columbia University, Senauke participated in the Columbia University strike of April 1968. That same year he left for California, arriving in the San Francisco Bay area where he began sitting zazen at the Berkeley Zen Center. He became Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1991, a position in which he served until 2001 . Though he was a peace and civil rights activist of the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1980s Senauke had more or less allowed his activism to become an exercise in intellectualism. His becoming director of BPF, as well as the emergence of the Persian Gulf War, allowed Alans activist tendencies and Buddhist practice to merge. Together, he and his colleague Tova Green brought BPF to the forefront of American engaged Buddhism. Along with Green, Senauke helped the BPF become a place in US society, and in the world, where the sources of violence could be contemplated. Th

Source: Wikipedia