Place and Community
The Felsentor Foundation was founded in 1999 by Zen priest Vanja Palmers and the Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast to create a place of encounter at this special site – an encounter with people, animals, nature, oneself, and ultimately with the great mystery that has many and no names.
Felsentor is run as a non-profit foundation by the Board of Trustees, which directs the destiny of the whole. Felsentor is the spiritual home both for the small house-community, which keeps the center alive with its daily practice, and for the Felsentor sangha, whose members live widely scattered. The Felsentor sangha, in turn, is part of the larger community – the Phoenix Cloud Sangha – that has sprung up around Zen Master Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi in various places in the USA and Europe. In this sense, Felsentor is part of a family of interconnected centers and local groups that practice in this tradition.
Felsentor is located in a breathtaking landscape, directly above Lake Lucerne. Surrounded by forests and alpine pastures, the site provides an ideal setting for a time of silence, retreat and meditation.
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FOUNDATION
Vanja Palmers
David Steindl-Rast
Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi
Sangha / Centers / Meditation Groups
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Buildings and Gardens
Zendo
History
Onuphrius Saga
Our way of life
The cultivation of silence is an essential foundation so that we humans can find peace in relation to ourselves and our fellow beings. Meditation therefore plays an important role in our way of life as well as in our seminar program.
In addition, the pursuit of a peaceful, non-injurious way of life involves a respectful treatment of all our fellow creatures, i.e. animals, plants and the earth as a whole. Commitment to animal welfare, in particular a rethinking of our attitude towards the so-called farm animals, is an important concern for us in order to effectively reduce suffering in this world.
The way we feed ourselves plays an important role in this, because it is potentially responsible, in million ways, for the suffering of sentient beings. As a consequence, we use plant-based, biological food, which we produce ourselves to a large extent on our organic farm, the Frohmatte. Thanks to this farm, we are by now largely self-sufficient when it comes to vegetables and salads.
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Everyday Zen
Animal Welfare
Felsentor Kitchen
organic farm frohmatte
