Meet the individuals responsible for establishing Zen as a practice in North America.
Between 2013 and 2025, Rick McDaniel conducted nearly 300 interviews with accredited Zen teachers and longtime practitioners in North America, several of whom (Bernie Glassman, Hozan Senauki, Mel Weitsman) have since died. What he was originally interested in was the scope of practices which self-identify as “Zen” on this side of the Pacific, but what he later realized was that he was gathering amounts to an oral history of Zen in North America. Original Face focuses on the pioneers who established Zen in North America as a practice—rather than a literary tradition—in the 1960s and ‘70s, based on first person accounts of people who studied with the pioneers.
