Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC) is an embodied training community in the Soto Zen tradition. We aspire to offer opportunities to realize personal and collective liberation through the cultivation of intimate, ethical, and just relationship with ourselves and all beings. Our vow to practice undoing harmful and oppressive conditioning compassionately transforms our world.. Founded in 2005 as the first Zen Center in Shunryu Suzuki’s lineage in New York, BZC embraces both Soto Zen tradition as well as the complex realities of practice in a diverse urban environment. BZC has grown rapidly to become one of the most active, community-engaged Zen centers in the northeast. BZC operates two separate temples: Boundless Mind Temple (BMT), which shares space at Christ Church Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, and Ancestral Heart Zen Temple (AHZT), located two hours north of New York City. Ancestral Heart is the first training temple in Suzuki Roshi’s U.S. lineage in the Northeast.