Hakuin Zenji was born in Hara, Japan in January 18, 1686. He began monastic studies as a teenager, studied with the great master Shiju Rojin, and developed his own teaching with Torei Enji, his first Dharma heir. On enormously popular teacher during his lifetime, he died one day shy of his 84th birthday, in Hara where he had begun, and is said to have left more than ninety dharma heirs.

Norman Waddell was born in Washington, DC in 1940. He studied by University of California, at the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies, and took his Ph.D at Otani University in Kyoto, where he had lived for many years. He has published more than a dozen books and is considered one of the finest translators of Japanese sacred texts of our time.