Anne Broache (The Daily Northwestern, Evanston, Illinois): To run a center for Zen Buddhist meditation, where silence and stillness are sacred necessities, a college town can provide more pitfalls than peace.
“Particularly students screaming as they walk past,” said Sevan Ross, director and resident teacher — or sensei — of the Chicago Zen Center.
Despite such noise and in spite of its name, the Chicago Zen Center has resided at 2029 Ridge Ave. in Evanston since the mid-1970s.
A group formed and opened the local center after Zen expert Roshi Philip Kapleau, who had founded the Rochester Zen Center in Rochester, N.Y., in the 1960s, held a public workshop in Chicago during the early ’70s. For years the center was affiliated with the Rochester center, which sent teachers to Evanston a few times each year to conduct meditative retreats.
Then Ross, a former Catholic who was ordained in 1992 as a Zen Buddhist priest, became the Chicago Zen Center’s director in 1996. He was sanctioned as a teacher two years later.
From the outside the Zen center resembles a typical Evanston house. It has a sprawling front porch, ample windows and gray-green siding. Ross said he hopes his bamboo plantings on the center’s north side will grow into the most massive grove in the city.
Inside, the aroma of incense — a difficult-to-find, Japanese temple variety, Ross noted — wafts through the halls. Walls have been added and subtracted. Bathrooms glow with bright blue and green paint.
“If you’re going to be a Zen teacher in the West,” Ross said, “you have to know carpentry and electricity and all of that.”
Meditation occurs on the polished wooden floors of the zendo, a large room that overlooks Ridge Avenue from the second floor. A small Buddha statue poses on an altar at the front…