Zen teacher Norman Fischer was born in Pennsylvania in 1946 to observant Jewish parents. As a child he prayed regularly. He became obsessed with death after his grandfather died, and the experience led him to study philosophy and religion in college, where he discovered Zen Buddhism. It was the 1960s, and Zen was “in the air,” he says. He viewed it as “existentialism without the angst.”
After graduating from Colgate University in New York State, Fischer attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he was dissatisfied with everything he wrote. Hearing that you could study Zen in San Francisco, he left for the West Coast as soon as he had earned his MFA. “I thought I’d learn how to meditate and do that on my own until I became enlightened,” he says, “just like in the books. I didn’t like gurus and Zen masters. I didn’t think I needed them. . . . I never wanted to become a Zen priest — God forbid!”
