Rev. Jiho Sargent has left this little world. A Soto priest, a friend, guide, mother and tough as nailsvoice of reason and common sense for many people from around the world who sat Zazen with her in Tokyo over many years. I consider her informally one of my guiding teachers, a great inspiration for the creation of Treeleaf Sangha.

I believethat I first sat with her in 1989 at the temple in Tokyo were she was apriest (Taisoji). She became a priest late in life, at age 49, and wasalso one of the few Westerners to be trained in a fully Japanese wayexclusively in Japan (at the Soto school’s special monasteries forwomen) and then served as an ordinary “parish priest” at Taisojiinvolved in the more mundane, “day-to-day” duties of a Zen priest inJapan … a very unusual path for most foreign teachers.  She also fought for the rights of female priests in the “man’s world” of Japanese Zen Buddhism.

She is the author of a book called “Asking About Zen” (also available in German, Spanish and some other languages)

…which was rather unusual for a Zen book, and can best be described as a”nuts and bolts,” “tell it like it is” dry, “bringing it down to earth”guide to many subjects which are explained rarely if ever to Zenstudents (and thus, are misunderstood by the great majority -especially Westerners). Jiho had a “set the record straight” style thatallowed her to comment on many aspects of Zen as it has come to bepracticed in the West that are usually ignored or “papered over” byother writers because they are rather controversial within the Zencommunity (a lot of the same subjects we freely discuss here atTreeleaf, in fact … she was a TREMENDOUS influence and source of muchof what we do, and how we do it, in this Treeleaf Sangha).
 

If you would like to read a bit more about her, here is a simple newspaper interviewshe gave many yearsago (I am not sure that all the quotes by her are exact, by the way, asthe reporter may have been paraphrasing) …

a sitting time of 20 to 35 minutes is recommended)

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