ABOUT VOCHA FISKE

Vocha Fiske White (1890-1974) apparently encountered the teachings of Murshid Samuel Lewis (“Sufi Sam”) in the 1930s. She began to practice Zen Buddhism around 1950. She was an actress and named a Communist sympathizer in the 1950s. She was a teacher and a student of General Semantics at San Francisco State University for about 20 years. She visited Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in the summer of 1970. At that time Suzuki-Roshi invited her to live at the City Center, which she did beginning that Autumn. She lived and practiced there for nearly four years and during that time became a familiar figure in the spiritual counterculture. To the end of her life, she occasionally gave dramatic readings in the dining room at the Zen Center. Even after she had become too weak to walk, she would sit the daily periods of zazen and sesshins upstairs in the Buddha Hall or in her room. When she let go of the possessions of her previous active life, she left very little of the material world. The books she had were well-worn and marked from her constant studying.