About
David Cohn trained in Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center's monasteries and practice centers from 1970 to 1984 and was ordained as a priest in 1974. He maintained lay practice while operating restaurants in San Francisco from 1985 to 2009. Cohn served as a volunteer with the Zen Hospice Project for 20 years and worked as a hospital chaplain beginning in 2002. He later practiced with Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center, where he serves as a board member, chaplaincy council member, and mentor.
Teaching focus
Cohn's core teaching draws on shikantaza (just sitting), breath-counting, koan introspection. The frame is the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, but the language stays plain. Cohn doesn't lecture from height. The talks tend to think alongside whatever's actually present in the room. Recurring themes include zazen, samu, and sangha. None of those get presented as abstract ideas. They're worked into the body, into ethics, into how a practitioner shows up in family life or at work, so that the dharma stops feeling like a separate compartment. Cohn works comfortably with longer-term practitioners. Talks assume some familiarity with sitting, and the questions tend to circle around how to keep practice alive once the early enthusiasm has thinned out. Format-wise, Cohn teaches in in-person, online, and the tone moves easily between guided sittings, dharma talks, and Q&A. Questions tend to get answered the way they were asked, without being reframed into something cleaner. That alone tells you a lot about how the room feels.
Background
David Cohn trained in Zen at the San Francisco Zen Center's monasteries and practice centers from 1970 to 1984 and was ordained as a priest in 1974. He maintained lay practice while operating restaurants in San Francisco from 1985 to 2009. Cohn served as a volunteer with the Zen Hospice Project for 20 years and worked as a hospital chaplain beginning in 2002. He later practiced with Gil Fronsdal at the Insight Meditation Center and Insight Retreat Center, where he serves as a board member, chaplaincy council member, and mentor. David Cohn was a resident practitioner at the Zen Center of San Francisco's three practice places, Tassajara Monastery, Green Gulch Farm, and the City Center, from 1970 to 1984, and was ordained as a priest in 1974. Since then he has carried on lay practice, became married and has a daughter and a grandson. He owned and operated two San Francisco restaurants from 1985 until retirement in 2009. He was a Zen Hospice Project volunteer for 20 years, and has been a Peninsula Hospital volunteer chaplain from 2002 to the present. He serves as board chairman and consultant for the Zen Center Everyday board, overseeing Greens. He practices now with Gil Fronsdal and the IMC and IRC communities, is an IMC board member, is on the IMC chaplaincy council, and is an IMC mentor. Cohn teaches across several communities, including Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. That work sits within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing, and the recurring concerns of Cohn's teaching, ethical foundation, steady attention, and the slow softening of habitual reactivity, echo the older texts without sounding distant from a 21st-century practitioner's life. What stands out across Cohn's talks isn't a single technique but a steadying tone. Practice is treated as something built slowly, in ordinary life, with care. There's room for the difficulties practitioners actually bring into the room, grief, restlessness, the body's complaints, family obligations, and the encouragement is consistent without being pushy.
Lineage
Cohn teaches within the Zen tradition of seated meditation and direct pointing. Source notes mention training with Gil Fronsdal. Current affiliations include Insight Meditation Center, Insight Retreat Center. The lineage shows up less in titles than in the way Cohn talks about practice, with steady reference to the older Buddhist vocabulary while keeping the door open for people who've never read a sutra. Whether that framing lands as monastic or lay depends on the specific talk, but the consistent thread is care for the form without letting the form become the point.
What to expect
Sitting with Cohn, you can expect grounded instruction in shikantaza (just sitting), with space to ask questions and bring whatever's actually showing up in your practice. Online sessions tend to keep the same shape, shorter sits, a talk, and time for Q&A, in a format that's accessible from home. The teaching voice is steady. Cohn won't push you past your edge, and there's a clear preference for slow, sustainable practice over breakthrough chasing. Bring a notebook if you like, or don't. Either way, you'll be met where you are.
