Zenkei Blanche Hartman (1926-2016) was a Soto Zen teacher practicing in the lineage of
Shunryu Suzuki. From 1996 to 2002 she served two terms as co-abbess of the
San Francisco Zen Center. She was the first woman to assume such a leadership position at the center. A member of the
American Zen Teachers Association, Blanche was especially known for her expertise in the ancient ritual of
sewing a kesa, called
Nyoho-e,
the practice of sewing Zen ceremonial robes
in the lineage of Sawaki Kodo Roshi, which she had learned during the 1970s from Kasai Joshin Sensei, formerly of Antaiji. She taught this unique form of Zen
practice to hundreds of students at the San Francisco Zen Center, and played an important
role in establishing the practice in North America.
Born in Birmingham, Alabama to non-practicing Jewish parents in 1926. Blanche was educated in
the Catholic school system in the early 1930s, but in 1943 her family moved to California, where her father served in the military. After taking up biochemistry and chemistry at the University of California she married Lou Hartman in 1947, giving birth to four children. In the late 1950s she found work as a chemist, though by 1968 she began questioning the direction of her life. She and her husband began sitting zazen regularly at the Berkeley Zen Center in Berkeley, California in 1969, and in 1972 the two entered
Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. The couple lived at all of the other San Francisco Zen Center sites, including City Center and Green Gulch Farm. Shuun Lou Hartman passed away in 2011.
