Nyogen Senzaki

Murshid Samuel L. Lewis
Photo by Saul Barodofsky

Nyogen Senzaki

Nyogen Senzaki was a master in the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism and a student of Soyen Shaku.

Samuel Lewis (aka: He Kwang), Joe Miller and Paul Reps studied together as dharma brothers under Nyogen Senzaki.

Early in Murshid SAM’s mureedship in Sufism, Nyogen Senzaki and Hazrat Inayat Khan were both invited to the home of Rabia Martin. This meeting is recorded by Nyogen Senzaki in the article “Sufism and Zen” originally published in the Japanese American on the 11th of May, 1923. Two short selections from his account are below:

His (Inayat Khan’s) eyes were now full of water—not the tears of the world, but from water from The Great Ocean — calm and transparent. I recited an old Zen poem — not with my mouth — not in thought, but with a blink like a flash. It reads:

No living soul comes near that water—

A vast sheet of water as blue as indigo!

The Abyss has a depth of ten-thousand feet.

When all is quiet and calm, at midnight,

Only the moonlight penetrates into the waves

And reaches the bottom easily and freely.

“Murshid,” said I, “I see a Zen in you.”

“Mr. Senzaki, I see a Sufism in you,” he replied.

Both of us then smiled, each at the other.

And later in the article:

At the corner of the street where I was about to bid the Murshid good-bye, I remarked; “All sounds return to one, and where goes that one?”

Inayat Khan stopped walking and, shaking hands with me, responded, “Good night, Mr. Senzaki.”

Sometime after this meeting, Hazrat Inayat Khan directed Samuel Lewis to continue his studies with Nyogen Senzaki, and Nyogen Senzaki likewise encouraged Samuel to continue his studies with Inayat Khan...

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