About
Peter Levitt is a Zen teacher in the Suzuki-roshi lineage and a Preceptor within the White Plum Asanga. He founded and guides the Salt Spring Zen Circle on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia. Levitt has authored seventeen books of poetry and prose. He served as Associate Editor of The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo and co-edited The Essential Dogen with Kazuaki Tanahashi. He and Tanahashi translated The Complete Cold Mountain and Blossom Awakening. With Rebecca Nie, he translated Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women. He received the Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry in 1989.
Teaching focus
Levitt's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Levitt teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Levitt's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Peter Levitt, Sensei appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Levitt has chosen to share there. A Zen teacher within the Suzuki-roshi lineage, and a Preceptor within the White Plum Asanga, Peter Levitt is the founder and guiding teacher of Salt Spring Zen Circle on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, where he resides with his wife, poet Shirley Graham. Known for the warmth, humour, clarity and depth of his teachings, Peter is also the author of seventeen books of poetry and prose. He is the Associate Editor of the Zen classic, The Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi; and he co-edited, with Tanahashi, The Essential Dogen: Writings of the Great Zen Master. In addition to other books translated together, he and Tanahashi are the translators of The Complete Cold Mountain: Poems of the Legendary Hermit Hanshan and Blossom Awakening: The Life and Poetry of Wandering Mong Saigyō. In 2022 Shambhala Publications brought out Yin Mountain: The Immortal Poetry of Three Daoist Women, which Peter and co-translator, Rebecca Nie, translated from the ninth century Chinese of the Tang Dynastic Period. Peter’s other books include Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom, and, in poetry, One Hundred Butterflies and Within Within, which Canadian Governor General Award recipient, Robert Hilles, called, “master works that reveal the interconnected fabric of it all in ways that will leave you stunned.” In the same vein, legendary American poet Robert Creeley wrote, “Peter Levitt’s poetry sounds the honor of our common dance.” In 1989, Peter received the prestigious Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry. That body of work places Levitt inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Levitt's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Levitt contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Levitt's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Levitt's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Levitt teaches in the Soto Zen lineage as a priest within that container. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Levitt's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Levitt at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Levitt's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Levitt is teaching.
