Barbara Rhodes

Barbara Rhodes (Zen Master Soeng Hyang) is head Zen master of the Kwan Um School of Zen with over forty years of practice and teaching experience. She met Seung Sahn in 1972, received inka from him in 1977, and dharma transmission in 1992. She has been teaching and leading retreats since 1978, and has been the head teacher of the international Kwan Um School of Zen since her teacher’s death in 2004. A registered nurse since 1969, she worked as a nurse until 2014, with twenty-seven years spent as a hospice nurse. She lives with her wife, Mary. Her daughter, Ann, and her family live nearby their home in California.

            She is an outstanding down-to-earth teacher, well respected in the Buddhist community, reflected by her inclusion in Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America, Revised and Updated Edition, by Lenore Friedman (Shambhala, 2000), which also includes such influential teachers as Pema Chödrön, Charlotte Joko Beck, and Sharon Salzberg. She was also included in Zen Master Who? A Guide to the People and Stories of Zen (Wisdom Publications, 2006), by James Ishmael Ford. Bobby is also a contributor to Being Bodies: Buddhist Wisdom on the Paradox of Embodiment (Shambhala, 1997), edited by Lenore Friedman and Susan Moon; and The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women (Wisdom Publications, 2013), edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon.