Teacher

Jack Duffy Roshi

Jack Duffy Rōshi

Jack Duffy Rōshi was given permission to teach by Robert Aitken Rōshi in January 1992 and was given independent teaching status and the title of Rōshi in the formal Transmission Ceremony 5 years later. Jack has been a student of Aitken Rōshi since 1981 and has studied with other teachers, including Joan Rieck and Thich Nhat Hanh. He brings his roles of spouse, father, and psychotherapist, as well as years of endangered species work and wilderness wanderings, to his teaching.

Robert Aitken Rōshi

Born Robert Baker Aitken in Philadelphia, he moved to Honolulu at the age of five with his parents and younger brother, when his father, an anthropologist, joined the ethnology field staff of Bishop Museum. After growing up largely in Hawaii (with several intervals in California, living with one set of grandparents or another), at the outbreak of the war in the Pacific he was captured on Guam, where he had been working as a civilian. His amazingly fortuitous introduction to Zen came during his ensuing years of internment in Japan, through a fellow internee, the British writer R.H. Blyth.

After his release, Aitken Rōshi resumed his interrupted college studies at the University of Hawaii, graduating in 1947 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. He returned to the university for a master’s in Japanese studies, which he received in 1950, and his thesis, concerning Zen’s influence on the great haiku poet Bashō, later became the basis of his first book, A Zen Wave.