Dharma Academy
...is on its way
Join our live & free online opening event "Engaging the Heart of Wisdom - Pathways for Meeting Uncertainty" from May 23-25.
You'll meet inspiring speakers, meditate & exchange with other practitioners, and explore the heart of wisdom in your daily life. No prior experience needed - open to anyone!
Live, Online & Free:
An Invitation to the Dharma Academy Opening Event
Engaging
the Heart of Wisdom
Pathways for Meeting Uncertainty
May 23–25
(all times in MST / Mountain Standard Time)
“Only by stepping out of how we think things should be, and into how they are, can we begin to imagine what they could become.”
-Tatsudo Baden Roshi
Join us for this weekend of inspiration, exploration, and exchange.
Creating an Online Campus & Community for Seekers
Dharma Academy offers an accessible curriculum and a supportive community that will help you integrate ancient wisdom teachings into the details of your lived life.
We offer a path for seekers, who cherish intellectual precision, open-mindedness, and the possibility of embodied spiritual transformation. We are dedicated to creating a space, in which views can be opened and compassionately shaped in relationship to the pressing global and societal challenges of our time.
Online Zendo
Daily Meditation
Every morning and evening, we’ll stream live from the meditation halls of our two practice centers — one in Europe, one in the US. You’re invited to sit with the residents.
Community
Practicing Together
The genius of monasticism lies in the discovery of mutuality. At the Academy, you’ll find companions to practice alongside.
Library
Self Study
Step by step, we’ll make available an archive of over 60 years of Baker Roshi’s teachings. The archive will be interactive, so you can explore and research at your own pace.
Dharma Talks &
A Wisdom Curriculum
We’ve developed a curriculum of Zen teaching and practice designed to support you — systematically — in feeling, embodying, and enacting the Dharma.
YOUR HOME,
YOUR MONASTERY
A Free 16‒Day Course to Establish & Support Your Practice at Home
Whether you are new to practice or an experienced meditator:
Get a taste and discover how to integrate Zen teachings into your daily life
Sign up for our free 16-day course - just 10 minutes each day
with Baden Roshi, the new Abbot of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center
ABOUT US
Dharma Academy offers transformative teachings of wisdom and compassion rooted in the Zen Buddhist Lineage Tradition.
We actively engage in dialogue with scientific institutions, societally engaged individuals, and experts in the fields of therapeutic methods to merge ancient wisdom with contemporary knowledge.
The teachings we are drawing from have evolved in response to three timeless questions that echo through human history:
- What is suffering and how can we be free from it?
- How can we cultivate clarity, insight, and reliable ways of knowing?
- How can we live ethically and naturally respond to our circumstances in beneficial ways?
As a Dharma Academy student,
you will learn how to explore, live, grow within these questions in the context of your daily life.
Through practice,
you will find restorative pauses while you are working or going about your day,
and you will notice transformative change in your thinking, feeling, and actions.
And as students meet each other, companionship is born:
Here you will meet others with whom to share the wonder and mystery of being alive.
“By cultivating the experience of stillness, we can begin to develop a 'category-free mind':
An unstructured mind, wild and deeply grounded in the immediacy of sensorial aliveness.
From this perspective, perception returns to its roots in appreciation and insight.
We are opened to learn more fully from the details of lived life and from the world itself:
From mountains, from the drifting of misty air and the intricacies of a birdsong.
From the smoke of a stick of incense, the look in the eye of another person, or the inevitability of death.”
Baden Roshi
Who we are
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi began practicing with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1968 and is a Dharma heir of Zentatsu Baker Roshi. He serves as Vice Abbot at the Zen Center in the Black Forest and leads seminars in Germany, Austria, and beyond. He lives in California and continues to support the international Sangha with teaching and presence.
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman is a university educator and curriculum developer with a focus on religious literacy and transformative education. Closely affiliated with Harvard Divinity School, she has worked with Harvard’s Religion and Public Life initiative since 2016. Her teaching bridges intellect, imagination, and embodiment — making her work deeply resonant with the Dharma Academy’s vision of learning as shared inquiry.
Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi
Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi (*1981) is the Dharma successor of Zentatsu Baker Roshi. She has been practicing with the Dharma Sangha since 2001. Until 2009, she studied psychology at the University of Oldenburg and simultaneously completed a training in the body-oriented method Body-Mind Centering©. She then lived for four years at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA, and has been at the Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest since 2013. In September 2024, Tatsudo Roshi officially assumed the Dharma succession and has since been guiding the spiritual direction of the Dharma Sangha as Abbot.
Richard Baker Roshi
Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi is a Zen teacher in the lineage of Dongshan and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He became Suzuki Roshi’s Dharma successor in 1971. Baker Roshi is the founder of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA, and the Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest, and served as the abbot of the Dharma Sangha until 2024. He lives and teaches from January to May in the United States and from May to December at the ZBZS. Since spring 2024, he has been offering a weekly online Dharma talk through the format “WeeklyZen.”
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi
Ryuten Paul Rosenblum Roshi began practicing with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi in 1968 and is a Dharma heir of Zentatsu Baker Roshi. He serves as Vice Abbot at the Zen Center in the Black Forest and leads seminars in Germany, Austria, and beyond. He lives in California and continues to support the international Sangha with teaching and presence.
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman
Sarabinh Levy-Brightman is a university educator and curriculum developer with a focus on religious literacy and transformative education. Closely affiliated with Harvard Divinity School, she has worked with Harvard’s Religion and Public Life initiative since 2016. Her teaching bridges intellect, imagination, and embodiment — making her work deeply resonant with the Dharma Academy’s vision of learning as shared inquiry.
Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi
Tatsudo Nicole Baden Roshi (*1981) is the Dharma successor of Zentatsu Baker Roshi. She has been practicing with the Dharma Sangha since 2001. Until 2009, she studied psychology at the University of Oldenburg and simultaneously completed a training in the body-oriented method Body-Mind Centering©. She then lived for four years at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA, and has been at the Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest since 2013. In September 2024, Tatsudo Roshi officially assumed the Dharma succession and has since been guiding the spiritual direction of the Dharma Sangha as Abbot.
Richard Baker Roshi
Zentatsu Richard Baker Roshi is a Zen teacher in the lineage of Dongshan and Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He became Suzuki Roshi’s Dharma successor in 1971. Baker Roshi is the founder of the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado, USA, and the Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest, and served as the abbot of the Dharma Sangha until 2024. He lives and teaches from January to May in the United States and from May to December at the ZBZS. Since spring 2024, he has been offering a weekly online Dharma talk through the format “WeeklyZen.”
Connecting with living tradition
Practice centers
The Dharma Academy works with the two established Zen Buddhist practice centers of the Dharma Sangha.
All three centers - the ZBZS, CMZC and the Dharma Academy - are deeply rooted in Zen Buddhism and make this path accessible to practitioners around the world - whether in a physical location or in the digital space.
Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest (ZBZS)
The Zen Buddhist Center Black Forest (ZBZS) is the European practice center of the Dharma Sangha in Germany. Meditation, mindfulness, wisdom and compassion are lived and taught here - in a practice that can be both suitable for everyday life and monastic. The ZBZS is open to everyone, regardless of experience or qualifications.
Crestone Mountain Zen Center (CMZC)
The Crestone Mountain Zen Center (CMZC) is the center of the Dharma Sangha in the USA, located in Crestone, Colorado. As a monastic place of silence, like the ZBZS, it offers traditional formats, seminars, individual retreats and live online lectures to deepen the practice and integrate it into everyday life.
