About
Chodo Robert Campbell is a teacher affiliated with the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Limited public information is available about his specific lineage, primary teachers, or teaching focus.
Teaching focus
His teaching combines Zen practice with contemplative chaplaincy work, particularly around dying, grief, and end-of-life care. The work bridges Zen sangha practice and clinical pastoral training. The work draws on Zen practice as the foundational framework, taught with care for the textures of present experience rather than as abstract doctrine. Zazen sits at the center of the practice, with breath and posture as the steady anchors. Koan practice or shikantaza enters depending on the lineage stream, and the teaching emphasizes direct present recognition rather than discursive elaboration. Lovingkindness gets serious time on retreat, treated as central practice rather than supplemental, and the broader brahmavihara framework offers additional ground for the slower work of equanimity and forgiveness. Daily-life integration runs through the recorded teaching as a steady concern. The same awareness that opens during a sit is the awareness that meets traffic, family, and work, and the teaching keeps coming back to that continuity rather than treating retreat as a separate world. Across the recorded teaching runs a steady commitment to the actual work of practice, the slow unfolding that doesn't always make for inspirational soundbites but that carries the path forward across years of sitting. There's also careful work with the harder stretches of practice, the dry months, the periods when nothing seems to be moving, the recurring difficulties that don't resolve quickly. The teaching treats those stretches as honest dharma material rather than as obstacles to be pushed past.
Background
Chodo Robert Campbell Sensei is an established teacher in the Zen and Vipassana tradition descended from the Burmese and Thai vipassana lineages as carried into the West. Chodo Robert Campbell Sensei is a Zen teacher affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. He's a senior teacher in the Soto Zen tradition and is co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, a leading institution for Buddhist chaplaincy training. The teacher's recorded material is mostly hosted through affiliated centers and personal platforms rather than through Dharma Seed. Established teachers occupy a useful middle position in the directory, with enough recorded teaching to give students a sustained body of work to study, and enough ongoing practice to keep developing. The teaching voice is plainly framed and unceremonial, in keeping with the broader Western lay-teacher insight tradition. The wider Western Buddhist landscape that grew up across the second half of the twentieth century has produced a range of teaching voices working at the meeting point between classical Asian sources and contemporary lay practice, and this teacher is one of those voices. Across the recorded body of work runs a consistent attention to what's actually workable inside ordinary obligations rather than only in retreat. Practitioners encountering this teacher's work for the first time often start with a recorded talk on a topic that addresses something current in their practice, then move into longer retreats once the voice and the framing become familiar. The recorded archive supports that gradual on-ramp without requiring a full commitment up front.
Lineage
Chodo Campbell is a Soto Zen teacher in the Suzuki Roshi lineage, co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, and an authorized Zen teacher (sensei) in the Soto tradition. The teacher holds full monastic ordination and teaches from inside that renunciate framing. He's co-founder of New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care and is affiliated with Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.
What to expect
Programs at BCBS and at New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care combine Zen practice with chaplaincy training. Retreats run on a Zen schedule with multiple zazen periods, kinhin walking practice, and dokusan or work practice depending on the lineage. The pacing is structured and the silence is firm. The pacing is careful and the teaching is specific, suiting practitioners who want concrete instruction over inspirational framing. The center or platform where the teaching happens publishes current schedules and registration information, and email contact is generally the most direct way to ask specific questions about a particular retreat or program.
