In-Between Places: Welcoming Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams

October 2, 2025

Duncan Ryuken Williams guides Masaharu Ishii in placing a stamp by his name in the Ireicho, or “Sacred Book of Names.”

This month, Brooklyn Zen Center is honored to welcome Rev. Duncan Ryuken Williams for our Saturday Morning Program on October 18th at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn. Rev. Williams is in New York as part of the national Ireichō tour, which brings the Book of Names to communities across the country.

Ahead of his Dharma Talk for BZC, Rev. Williams shares these words with our sangha:

I was ordained as a Soto Zen Buddhist priest a little over 30 years ago at a temple in Nagano, Japan. I was teenager when I first met my teacher, Ryugen Ogasawara, who told me at our initial meeting that the Buddhist path to freedom could be found in the in-between places, hence the designation “Middle Way” for our religion. This was a helpful teaching as I was trying to figure out my place in the world, having been born in Japan to a Japanese Buddhist mother and a British Christian father.

Our lineage teaches us that the “who-am-I” question is a good one for anyone interested in Buddhism – to study the Buddha Way is to study the self (Dogen’s Genjokoan). In some ways, we could say that Zazen is an act of paying attention to ourselves, being awake to the self that is connected to all things.

Because of the interlinked world in which we exist, many of the projects I’ve been involved in – such as the Irei Project (a monument to the Japanese American WWII incarceration), Tsuru for Solidarity (a Japanese American-led movement advocating for racial and immigrant justice), or May We Gather (an Asian American Buddhist response to anti-Asian animus and violence) – are based on how we activate our Buddha nature.

I’ll be giving a Dharma talk, but I hope it will also be more like a Dharma exchange, so we can learn from each other. See you soon!


Rev. Williams is the author of the award-winning American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Drawing on newly translated diaries, letters, and extensive interviews, the book reveals how Japanese American Buddhists maintained their practice and dignity while imprisoned in concentration camps during WWII. It shows how faith became a source of strength and resistance, and how these communities refused to allow the state to define who they were or what they could believe.

He’s currently traveling the country with the Ireichō tour—a book containing all 125,284 individuals of Japanese ancestry unjustly incarcerated during the war. Visitors are invited to stamp names with a blue hanko, and each mark becomes part of a permanent, growing monument.

Learn More

Rev. Williams’ dharma talk on October 18th at 11:20 AM will be live-streamed for those who cannot attend in person.