The Delaware Valley Zen Center

DVZC Guiding Teacher Zen Master Tan Gong ( José Ramírez)   José  is the Co-Guiding teacher of the Providence Zen Center, and the Guiding Teacher of the Delaware Valley Zen Center, which he helped found in the Spring of 1999. He has been practicing in the Kwan Um School of Zen since 1994, received Inka in April 2009, received transmission in 2023, and leads both Zen and Christian-Buddhist retreats. He has a degree in mathematics from the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas, Venezuela, and a Masters and Ph.D in statistics from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. In his role as an industrial statistician, he works closely with engineers and scientists to help them make sense of data. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island with his wife and daughter.

Why participate in a retreat?

The reason we practice Zen is to understand ourselves completely and help this world. The suffering we experience in our own lives, and indeed the suffering of our world, comes from our inability to connect with our true self, which is originally compassionate and clear. It's as if the owner of a sophisticated piece of machinery has lost the original instructions that came with it, and has forgotten its original function. The result is confusion and harm. A retreat can be thought of as reacquainting ourselves with the original instructions that came with our model.

After his enlightenment, the Buddha said, "How wondrous! Everybody already has it; they just don't know it. Truly, all beings are whole and complete, lacking nothing." Sitting a Zen retreat is a vital part of the process of waking up to our true self.