Cloud Zendo’s Lineage

Our teaching lineage represents the authentic generation-to-generation preservation of Zen practice. The full process of lineage transmission and verification of a teacher in our tradition includes the authorization to teach, as well as the ability to empower others to teach.

The historical story of the teaching on what passes between teacher and student is set in India on Mount Grdhrakūta about 2500 years ago when the Buddha, Shakyamuni, twirlied a flower and one of his followers, Mahakāshyāpa, smiled. With that exchange the Buddha recognized Kashyāpā as his successor. Kashyāpā is widely regarded as the first ancestor in a long (and not necessarily unbroken) succession of teachers who put down roots and extended branches throughout Asia and the West.

Cloud Zendo’s lineage may be traced directly to Rinzai-based Korean Soen, with its through line running to ancient Chinese Chan sources. But our approach to Zen has also been shaped by Japanese Soto and Rinzai traditions and practices adopted by recent generations of teachers in our lineage. Cloud Zendo’s teacher has continued on this path, studying Soto Zen with Tenshin Reb Anderson Roshi over more than a decade.

Cloud Zendo is a member of the Single Flower Sangha family of Zen practice groups and “floating zendos” under the guidance of the senior teacher in our lineage, Zen Master George Bo Mun Bowman.

Zen Master Danan received inka (2019) and transmission (2025) from Zen Master Bo Mun. Bo Mun received inka (1977) and transmission (1992) from the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn. A member of the Jogye Order of Soen, Seung Sahn spent six years in Japan and then moved to the United States in the 1970s. He founded the International Kwan Um School of Zen in Providence Rhode Island in 1983.

Dae Soen Sa Nim, the honorific by which Seung Sahn was known, established practice centers all over the world. He also gave Bo Mun authorization to create his own teaching line. Single Flower Sangha is thus an independent offshoot of the Kwan Um School of Zen. (See video below. George Bowman and Bobby Rhodes, the first two westerners Seung Sahn gave transmission to, appear together at 7:11. )

In Korea Seung Sahn studied under the great Zen Master Ko Bong, from whom he received transmission (1949) at age 22. Seung Sahn had completed a hundred-day retreat on a mountain and experienced an awakening. Here is the poem he wrote about it:

The road at the bottom of Won Gak Sahn Mountain

is not the present road.

The man climbing with his backpack

is not a man of the past.

Tok, tok — his footsteps

transfix past and present.

Crows out of a tree.

Caw, caw, caw.

A pair of solitary wild geese flap on the ground and fly up high, a couple of mandarin ducks stand alone by the bank of the pond. Leaving aside for the moment the meeting of arrow points, what about when a saw cuts a scale beam?

— Case 17, Fayan’s “HairsBreath,” Book of Serenity, translated by Thomas Cleary.

Danan designed and edited and arranged the private printing in 2015 of “Wild Geese,” a collection of Dharma talks given during a sesshin in Tallahassee, Florida by Bo Mun and Zen Master David Dae An Rynick.

Teachers in the Single Flower Lineage

Roshi Bo Mun George Bowman, Single Flower Sangha, Lexington, KY

Roshi Jian David Klinger, Contact: david.jian.klinger1023@gmail.com

Zen Master Bodhin Gary Beard, Green Mountain Zen Center, Huntsville, AL

Zen Master Danan John Wark, Cloud Zendo, Auburn, CA

Senior Dharma Teacher Chisho Chris Keevil, Garden Oak Sangha, Woodbridge, CT

Zen Master David Rynick, Boundless Way, Wooster, MA

1. Gift from Roshi Jian David Klinger ↩︎