IN THE MID-NINETIES, my old friend Roshi Bernie Glassman shared with me that he and his wife, Jishu, had closed his big Zen center in Yonkers and moved into a “rough” neighborhood in the area to explore more directly radical, socially engaged service.
On his fifty-fifth birthday, Bernie explained, he, Jishu, and a few friends had sat on the icy steps of the U.S. Capitol in the depth of winter, contemplating their path into the future. This experience had contributed to the birth of the vision of the Greyston Mandala, a kind of bodhisattva institution situated at the intersection of many landscapes of suffering. The Greyston Mandala and Greyston Foundation were to become a large social services complex in Yonkers, New York, including the Greyston Bakery, an HIV clinic, child care, after-school programs, low-income
