Return to Spring/Summer 2026
Interview with Linc Rhodes, JDPSN
I traveled a lot with Zen Master Seung Sahn. We would come once a week to the Korean temple in Woodside, Queens where people really revered him. I recall how Zen Master Seung Sahn first got the New York Zen Center going, and how I ended up right in the middle of it.
In the beginning, we didn’t have a real center. A Korean family with two daughters rented a room on the 14th floor of the Chase Manhattan Bank building at Times Square. They brought a giant rice cooker, a big Buddha, and a refrigerator. On Sundays they would come and basically camp there—practice, eat, chant, and make a day of it. People would show up sometimes during the week, but Sundays were the main thing.
Seung Sahn wanted to teach Americans, and he asked me if I would live in New York City. At that time I had long hair in a ponytail and a beard. New York was the last place I wanted to live. But he looked me straight in the eye and said, “If you can practice in New York City, you can practice anywhere.” He was dead serious about it. So I moved.
And believe it or not, I lived in that Chase Manhattan space at Times Square. I had access because someone let me come in with my bag, and they let me stay at night. My mornings were unreal. I’d go into the bathroom to wash my dishes, and then these office workers would come in with briefcases, heading to work, and they’d look at me like, “What is this guy doing in the bathroom?” It was a tiny place. We could only cram in a few people. Seung Sahn told me to find something bigger.
I didn’t know New York City well, so I just walked around until I found a loft on 20th Street. It was on the fourth floor, and the elevator opened right onto the loft. The place was completely stripped—bare walls, basically nothing but a toilet. But in New York you could sign a long lease, build it out yourself, and you had some protection if you invested in it. So I signed a ten-year lease.
40 E 20th Street, 2026
We started practicing there right away, even before it was finished. We had a rice cooker, and across the street there was a breakfast place with a one-dollar breakfast. Seung Sahn took me there every morning—he’d buy two breakfasts and a cup of coffee. Then we’d go back and work.
I found a construction guy through the Village Voice. His name was Bernie. He lived in Brooklyn and had started a construction company after he broke his neck and couldn’t do heavy work the way he used to. Bernie knew the codes, and that mattered, because the place was empty—we had to build everything from scratch. He brought in a crew: one big guy, and a friend named Tex who was an electrician at Coney Island. Bernie was the brains of the build-out. He told me exactly what the code required—how the pipes had to be brazed, what cable to use, how to do things so they would pass inspection. I did a lot of the work myself, and his guys did the parts I couldn’t do.
The big guy didn’t like taking direction from me. He also couldn’t read instructions well. He’d try to install things like a dishwasher by just looking at the pictures, and it was hit-or-miss. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up because he couldn’t navigate the subway signs. It was chaotic, but we built it out.
This was 1975. I can’t remember the exact date, but that’s the year. When it was finally finished, we put in a blue carpet and made a real practice space. Then all these Korean people came and brought plastic flowers—piles of them—and covered the altar. I was a hippie with a beard and the last thing I wanted was plastic flowers all over the altar, so I complained to Seung Sahn about it. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I was genuinely irritated.
We had an opening ceremony. As for the date, I have to admit I don’t know. It was fifty years ago. I remember the dedication ceremony and where it happened. It was at the 20th Street location. People were excited because it was much bigger than that one-room setup at Times Square. Korean families from Queens were deeply dedicated and probably contributed most of the money. Over time, younger Korean people came and a Korean nun encouraged them. She liked chanting and bowing, and she brought people who were hungry for a different style of practice that included sitting meditation.
Seung Sahn brought a monk from Korea—heavyset, a calligrapher. He moved in. What amazed me was that he wasn’t very interested in sitting meditation; during sitting he’d fall asleep. But he could do beautiful calligraphy, and the Korean people would take him out to dinner and treat him like a respected teacher.
Other people moved in and out too. A man named Jerry came from Providence and moved in. A woman named Carole was around, and one night something strange happened. We were practicing, and I heard the elevator open—the one that came up from the ground floor—and a man came into the dining room, a big, scary guy who robbed us of a typewriter and a camera. I remember feeling stuck because I was in the middle of practice and didn’t know what to do.
Living in New York, I saw things I never saw anywhere else—not because New York was “worse,” but because there were so many people and so much intensity. I saw someone jump out of a fourth floor window. I saw a man in a suit with a briefcase nearly get hit by a car, then turn around and smash the car with his briefcase so hard he dented it. The driver came out and beat him up. And I got robbed once by teenage kids after I took the wrong street at night. That’s when you learn quickly that some streets you simply don’t walk on at night.
One memory I’ll never forget is when an artist friend of Seung Sahn’s came from Los Angeles. He was Korean and made money painting Elvis on velour. He came to New York and tried to sell his paintings to Korean people. One day he said he was going to do a painting class, so he came into the dharma room. We had that blue carpet and plastered walls. He set up his inkstone and brush, ground the ink, sat for a few minutes like he was meditating, and then stood up and painted a giant bodhisattva right on the wall—life-size, beautiful—finished in about fifteen minutes. If I had known he was going to paint on the wall, I would have put up a canvas. But he painted directly on the wall. You couldn’t take it down and save it when it came time to move.
At some point, the Zen Center situation shifted again. The 20th Street place lasted for a number of years, and then we moved on. The Korean supporters found a building near the Empire State Building—on 31st Street—and they bought it. I went down and spent about a month helping build out a floor. If I remember right, there was a restaurant on the lower level, and the third and fourth floors were empty when we started.
Richard Shrobe had started coming to Providence on weekends and then New York. He had been a director of a spiritual organization, then stepped away from that, and he liked sitting. Steve Cohen came too. A man from Poland, a professor at NYU, came on weekends during a visit to the U.S. Before he returned to Poland, he invited Seung Sahn to come. Back in Poland, he got his university to issue a formal invitation, and that helped Seung Sahn get a visa. At first, the Korean government didn’t want him to go, but Seung Sahn had connections and got permission. That trip became the beginning of the interest in Zen practice in Poland.
Looking back, the essential story is this: from a borrowed Sunday room at Times Square, to a stripped loft on 20th Street that we built out ourselves, to a purchased building near the Empire State Building, the Zen center in New York was created through direct effort—construction work, community support, dedication ceremonies, chanting, and daily practice. It grew not from resources but from commitment.