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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.1 (2025): 93–121; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.01.04
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Asia-European Exchanges Mediated through Buddhism, Buddhism and Medicine: New Perspectives)
A Zen Circle Behind the Iron Curtain: Identity Formation of the First Polish Zen Buddhists
Przemysław SKRZYŃSKI
Jagiellonian University
Abstract: The increased interest in Buddhist practice, developing in the United States and Europe since the 1950s, has also affected Poland and other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Initially limited to the academic community—linguists and philosophers—in the second half of the 1960s, on the wave of fashion and the development of hippie ideas, interest in oriental religions, especially Buddhism, penetrated into polish artistic and countercultural communities. In this article I analyze the activity of the pioneering Zen Buddhist community, the ‘Zen Circle’, operating in the Polish People’s Republic, which began its activity in the early 1970s. The Buddhist group was the subject of concern for the Security Service (secret police), one of whose tasks was to investigate churches, religious communities, and religious associations. In the article I discuss the charges brought against Buddhists by the Polish United Workers’ Party authorities and the political police, as well as the forms of surveillance to which they were subjected, including using a network of secret agents operating inside and periodic forms of pressure, such as detentions, searches, and confiscation of illegal writings published by Polish Buddhists. Polish authorities also feared the group’s ties to its main leader, Philip Kapleau, who, as an American, was seen as a ‘representative of an imperial power’. Kapleau’s visit in 1975, which initiated the group’s formal development, was also the first visit by a Buddhist teacher to Poland for missionary purposes. The work places the group in the broader context of minority religious communities operating in the Polish People’s Republic and how Buddhist adepts functioned ‘behind the Iron Curtain’.
Keywords: Zen Buddhism, Buddhism in Eastern Europe, Buddhism in Poland, Rochester Zen Center, Philip Kapleau, illegal religious communities
About the Author: Przemysław Skrzyński, Ph.D., is a Research Assistant at the Institute for the Study of Religions, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. His teaching comprises both religious and cultural studies, including contemporary Buddhism, presence of religious themes in art, research into religious archives, and Religious Studies methodology. His main research interests include the ritual and symbolic acculturation of oriental religions in Western cultural communities, the sociology of communities, and Buddhist-Christian interreligious dialogue. He is currently completing work on his book about the first Buddhist communities in Poland. He also works as a staff member at the Kyoto-Kraków Foundation, which houses legacy of the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
