Meditation has changed my life for much, much better. It brings us closer to our true selves. Before moving to Bozeman, I participated in online meetings with the Insight meditation group, one of four groups within the Bozeman Dharma Center (BDC).  I have learned so much from their teacher, Floyd Fantelli, an expert on the Pãli canon from the Theravada tradition. The Insight group is now under the guidance of a most kind and devoted teacher, Suzanne Colón.

I was already inclined to follow the Soto Zen tradition because two of the writers I love most, Natalie Goldberg and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, belong to that Japanese lineage, which was spread in the U.S. by Suzuki Roshi through the centers he created in mid 1960’s: San Francisco Zen Center, Green Gulch Farm, and Tassajara. Two among the first American heirs of Suzuki Roshi, Mel Weitsman and Norman Fisher, became the teachers of Karen DeCotis, a Zen priest, a Buddhist teacher, and the director of the Bozeman Dharma Center. She lives in Bozeman with her son, Yujun, and their dog, Buddy.

Wit is a very distinguished quality transmitted from millennia from Zen masters, and Karen inherited that humorous and fast intelligence in profusion together with her lovely kindness and humbleness. 

“Want also means lack,”

a spiritual path.

Karen DeCotis chose to follow a spiritual path very early on in her life. She belongs to the lineage of female ancestors who took the vow of a Zen Buddhist life, and knows what it’s like to want spiritual and emotional clarity. “Want also means lack,” she says.  “I think of Patachara, who lived more than 2500 years ago, and all she lost in the blink of an eye.  When I read her poems, my heart broke.”

Patachara became a Buddhist nun after unbearable pain: her husband, her newborn baby, her toddler, her parents, and her brother all died on the same day. Traveling, crazed and naked, she met the Buddha, who woke her up: “Sister, regain your presence of mind.” She followed his teachings and became one of the first Buddhist women to lead many other nuns as her students.

“Imagine walking miles with other women to renounce worldly affairs, and to take up a life of spiritual practice,” invites DeCotis. Imagine suffering so much that the holy life is a relief.  When I read about her, I ask myself, why am I even doing this practice? Why do I seek comfort more than clarity, discipline, and a clean path? What do I hope to bring forth for myself, for my son and our community?”

Karen was born in Rome, New York, into a family of Italians. She lived there until she was nine; her older sister Denise was 13, and her younger brother Donald just six, when they moved to Texas. She lived in San Antonio until she was 18, then moved to Boston, where she majored in theater at Emerson College “with some late 1970s counterculture types of theater, lots of breathing, screaming, stretching, and extending.” After a year in New York, working at NYU, “where I was the only bike messenger without a bike,” she went to Toronto to live with a boyfriend. He was a Buddhist and a musician. They moved to California, where Karen earned a master’s degree in education at UCLA. “When we separated, and after trying to teach elementary school children in downtown Los Angeles, I escaped to a Zen Buddhist farm in Marin County. I farmed and meditated for years on that farm.”

In the collection Therīgāthā, two poems are attributed to Patachara, and both have farmers as their first image. “Wandering Robe,” translated and recreated by Matty Weingast, starts like this:

Farmers turn up the soil, plant seeds

and wait.

All by itself,

water pours down from the sky

and turns earth into food.

After all these years

sleeping on the ground,

waking before dawn,

and begging for every meal –

where’s my harvest?

“So, I landed at Green Gulch Farm in 1986, and I worked there for three years,” continues DeCotis. Then I went to the Tassajara monastery before Jukai (lay precepts), which took place at Berkeley Zen Center in 1992 with Zoketsu Norman Fischer. I took a year off, and for eight years I practiced at the Berkeley Zen Center, studying closely with Mel Weitsman. I fell in love again and married another musician. After we lived in Los Angeles, I followed him to Bozeman. By this time, I was 46; we lived in a community of people seeking spirituality, and we adopted our son.”

The history of the Zen group in Bozeman goes back to 1999, when Wendy Roberts invited Tenshin Reb Anderson to lead a retreat. Following that, they started practicing zazen (sitting meditation) on Monday evenings in the basement of Wendy’s home. Since 2006, Karen has led the Bozeman Zen Group.

After moving to Bozeman, DeCotis received lay entrustment from Sojun Roshi, granting her permission to teach. And, in 2016, she was ordained a priest. Asked what it means to her to be a Zen priest, DeCotis responds, “To renounce attachment to fame, gain, my looks. To dedicate my life to waking up from all the ignorance, to help and serve others to find a path, so they can learn to work with and find some freedom from their suffering. To be part of a community of people who wish to see and accept things, and learn how to respond skillfully and helpfully, to have some fun and cool outfits, and do beautiful ceremonies.” In the West, priests tend to live a secular life.

In 2019, Karen received Dharma transmission, becoming a dharma heir of the late Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi lineage. “They call it mind to mind transmission, which means that your teacher has confirmed your understanding of the Dharma,” explains DeCotis. “As a full transmitted priest, I can now ordain people.”

In May this year, Joe Gastón, “Seitoku Shinkon” (Quiet Virtue, Sincere Determination) and Michãel Palmer, “Kisen Hoshin” (Radiant Spring, Dharma Heart) were ordained as priests by Karen at the BDC.

The Bozeman Dharma Center (BDC)

The center is the house of four groups (sanghas) of different Buddhist lineages. The focus is largely the same: meditation and community life to address the deep challenges of our lives. The styles of meditation and the rituals are different.​Besides the Zen Group and the Insight community (Vipassana/Theravada tradition), the center also hosts Joining Rivers, based on the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, led by Steve Allison-Bunnell, and the Palyul Tibetan Sangha, led by Joy Johnson. Other programs include MindSpace, for young adults under 40, coordinated by Kerry Neal and Mary Corelli, and the Tergar International Meditation Community, coordinated by Sheila Devitt.

“The BDC is a wonderful experiment. It brings different lineages of Buddhist practices together to offer people a peaceful refuge, a place to practice meditation, to get to know themselves, to find joy in life even though they’re suffering, and to live an awakened life,” says DeCotis, adding, “you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice Buddhism. The teaching of the Buddha is for anyone, from any religion or any political party. A Jew, a Christian, a Muslim can come and sit meditation.”

Illuminating Names

In his book, Turning Words: Transformative Encounters with Buddhist Teachers (2023), Hozan Alan Senauke says: “There is a simple lesson I learned from Karen some years ago…. Ask yourself, ‘Do you want to be right, or do you want to be in connection?’”

One of the aspects that I found most beautiful in the Soto Zen tradition is the gesture of receiving and sewing your dharma name. “These names are poetic, using kanji, the Chinese alphabet, with Japanese meaning and pronunciation,” Karen explains. “The first name describes you in your practice, and the second name is like your aspirational name, the name that you will sort of grow into as you practice.” 

Karen’s first dharma name, given by Norman Fisher in 1992, is Sekishun Kanshi, meaning, Red Spring, Insight Vow. As a priest, she received the name Senshin Gyokuko, given her by Sojun Mel Weitsman, meaning Deep Spring, Radiant Jewel. “In Norman’s name is the season spring, while in Sojun’s name, the spring is the water bursting,” she mentions.

Patachara’s poem ends with water by teaching the following:

Late one evening,

I was washing my feet

after another long day

of sitting and walking

The water

poured

over

my feet

and onto

the ground.

I let my mind go,

and it flowed downhill with the water

towards my little hut.

I went inside,

sat on the bed,

and lowered the wick of the lamp.

All by itself,

the flame

went

out

Patachara’s message reverberates today. Zenju expresses: “When dark is here, you know that’s when things are being illuminated.”

“When the flame went out,” says Karen, “the awakening happened – accepting the dark of not knowing opens the heart.”

For information about classes and retreats, visit bozemandharmacenter.org. The center is supported almost exclusively by “dana,” donations.