Adyashanti.

Her group met above her house in the Los Gatos foothills, and his first lesson wasn’t philosophical at all. It was about how he’d kicked off his shoes at her door, carelessly, and what that carelessness revealed (Spirituality+Health).

At 25 he had a kensho experience he later described as penetrating “to the emptiness of all things,” realizing the Buddha he’d been chasing was what he already was (The Sun). He kept sitting for years afterward while working at his father’s machine shop, and at 31 a further awakening resolved his remaining doubts. Justi authorized him to teach in 1996. His first talks drew a handful of people to a room above his aunt’s garage; some weeks no one came at all. He took the name Adyashanti, Sanskrit for primordial peace, as the gatherings grew into the hundreds.

He later spent years reading Christian mystics and the Gospels alongside his Zen practice, work that became the book Resurrecting Jesus and led to a 2014 appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday (HuffPost). It’s a small, telling detail: a Zen teacher who wouldn’t stay inside Zen. Traditions borrow from each other more than their gatekeepers admit, and Adyashanti built a teaching career out of refusing to pick a single fence to stay behind.

With his wife Mukti he founded Open Gate Sangha in 1996 to support his teaching, and he authored True Meditation, Emptiness Dancing, and The Impact of Awakening among his books. He retired from active teaching in October 2023, citing PTSD from a long period of intense physical pain, and now lives with Mukti in the Eastern Sierras.