Seeds for a Boundless Life

Short and accessible teachings from one of America's pioneer woman Zen teachers.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman is an American Zen legend. A teacher in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, she was the first female abbot of an American Zen center. She is greatly revered, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she has lived and taught for many years. This, her long-awaited first book, is a collection of short teachings taken from her talks on the subject of boundlessness--the boundlessness that sees beyond our small, limited self to include all others. To live a boundless life she encourages living the vows prescribed by the Buddha and living life with the curiosity of a child. The short, stand-alone pieces can be dipped into whenever one is in need of inspiration.

Zenkei Blanche Hartman (1926–2016) was a Soto Zen teacher in the lineage of Suzuki Roshi and a revered elder figure in American Zen. She spent two terms as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center and was in fact the first woman abbot of a Zen center in America. She’s an expert in rakusu-sewing (those bib-like things you see Zen practitioners wear that represent the Buddha’s robe), and she's been particularly known for her attention to women’s issues in Buddhism and Zen.