The center, which is in Leverett, MA in Dixon House, 4 Montague Road, was started by Eve Marko who is the wife of Bernie Glassman who was a founding member of the Zen Peacemaker Order.  The order and the Green River Center draw their roots from Soto Zen practices in Japan.

The Green River Zen Center, while practicing zazen, engages in social action as well.  They believe that they sit in order to understand how the world works and in turn how to change what is wrong with it.  The group has participated in a variety of bearing witness ceremonies (expand on this) in Rwanda and for American Indian tribes.  Recently the center has collected coats for the lakota tribe for the winter. As well as these social action engagements, the center has free sittings open to the public every Saturday at 8am and every Tuesday night 7-9pm. There are also personal trainings and day long retreats from 9am-5pm as well as 2-3 day retreats.

The center believes that they are a part of a teachers’ lineage that goes from Eve through Bernie Glassman through Taizan Maezumi and through many Soto Zen teachers in Japan, but that says nothing about the bigger framework for the sangha as a whole. They are not a part of any association and they don’t subscribe to a joint vision with any other sangha, giving them a certain amount of freedom and the ability to remain a small close knit community, which Sensei Sally Sonen Kealy sites as the centers most admirable quality, “we really care about one another,” were her exact words.

Sally began her studies with Roshi Koun Yamada and Sister Elaine MacInnes in the Philippines, continuing with Roshi Bernie Glassman and other Zen teachers in the US. She received transmission from Bernie in April 2011.  Another teacher is Eve, who started the center. She received dharma transmission from Roshi Bernie Glassman in 1999 and Inka in 2011. During the 1990s she wrote children’s books. In addition to teaching, she edits dharma books and continues to write adult and young people’s fiction. Other than Eve and Sally, another teacher is ​Sensei John Genyo Sprague who raised and homeschooled two sons, and has worked for many years as a musician and teacher. He first studied Tibetan Buddhism in college with Robert Thurman, and later practiced Dzogchen with several masters. He has also worked with a variety of spiritual traditions, receiving a masters degree in World Religions from Vermont College in 2000. For the past ten years he studied Zen with Roshi Eve Marko, receiving Dharma transmission from her in August, 2015.

Contact Information:

e-mail: grzc@comcast.net; for registrations: dantikapm@gmail.com

website: www.greenriverzen.org

phone: 978-544-2623

Mailing Address: P.O. Box 247

Montague, MA 01351