Vanja Palmers

 

Current Position

Zen monk

Bio

Vanja Palmers has been a way-seeker all his life, the last 45 years, mostly under the ZEN flag During the 1970s and early 1980s, Palmers spent 10 years as a monk at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center (Carmel Valley, CA). Being an animal rights activist, in 1981 he and two fellow monastics at Tassajara founded Buddhists Concerned for Animals (BCA). In 1989 he co-founded Ökumenisches Haus der Stille (House of Silence) at Puregg in the Austrian province of Salzburg along with the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. The House of Silence is a place of interreligious dialogue, particularly between Christians and Buddhists. In 1998 he founded Stiftung Felsentor in Switzerland, a meditation center with a special focus on animal rights that also runs a vegetarian restaurant during the summer months. For the past 30 years, he has been leading retreats in Europe and the US.