Konrad Ryushin Marchaj, abbot at Zen Mountain Monastery since John Daido Loori succumbed to cancer two years ago, fairly bounds about instead of walking. Inside the historic structure first built by Norwegians as a retreat of another sort at the Plank Road site on the way to Phoenicia from Route 212, he prepares two coffees from a side table in the heavy-timbered downstairs refectory, while monks talk in front of the space’s massive bluestone fireplace as people start to vacuum and mop floors.
“Shall we find a quieter place?” Ryushin asks, leading us out heavy doors to a carved bluestone entryway, where we sit on benches across from each other in the cool October morning air. A cacophony of busy noise and the smell of fresh dug earth rises from the nearby construction site where the new Sangha House has started to rise.
“Sangha, being a name for our concept of community, will offer us a way of interfacing with the public in a way that’s not so hardcore religious,” he starts to say. “The perpetual challenge and dilemma of any monastery is to balance a removal from society with a liminal entity…it’s a reality sitting on margin.”
Ryushin talks about his dual roles watching over the monastery’s spiritual well-being, and the integrity of its teachings set in place by Daido, while also looking after its fiscal soundness, its development and growth elements, as any executive director would.
How did he get to this position?
The abbot starts by explaining Mountain & Rivers Order founder John Daido Loori’s declining months and weeks, when he oversaw the completion of Konrad Ryushin Marchaj’s training, and decided to split the order and monastery’s future oversight…at least for the years following Daido’s passing. While Ryushin was named abbot of the monastery in Mt. Tremper, Geoffrey Shugen Arnold was named abbot of MRO’s monastery in New York City, as well as of the order as a whole.
Ryushin goes back to his immigration to New Jersey from Warsaw in 1967, undergraduate studies at Yale in Anthropology, and receipt of medical degrees in Pediatrics and then Psychology from Albany Med School. At one point, he did a pediatrics residency with the U.S. Navy, part of it at Guantanamo Bay. Later, in the mid-1980s, he helped initiate a nationwide psychiatry-in-the-streets program, the Mobile Crisis Team, that is still running in Albany County.
Ryushin’s entrance into Buddhism came via studies at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies in Massachusetts in the early 1980s, and his eventual introduction to Daido, and Zen Mountain Monastery, at a conference on Psychiatry and Buddhism in 1987.
“By 1991 I moved in here,” the current abbot adds. “I was ordained in 1995 and Daido transmitted me in June of 2009, four months before he died.”
I ask whether he’s always had a heart open to helping others, a natural state of empathy. He replies by talking about a rough period in his teens, when a high school history teacher tried to help him.
“She took me aside and said she saw something in me,” he recalls. “She said I should start reading Thomas Merton.”
Engulfed in the famous Catholic author’s works about monastic life, Konrad Marchaj started looking into how he could make his way to Gethsemane, the secluded monastery in rural Tennessee that Merton made famous in the 1950s and 1960s. But then his mother discovered his plans…and quashed them.
“I also remember a grandfather from back in Warsaw who was a real wheeler dealer. After making it through the war, he survived the communist years by producing religious items in the basement,” Ryushin adds. “He would smuggle them into the various religious communities around Poland and I would go with him as a boy. I still recall being impressed by all the incense, the many candles, the mysteriousness of everything. It felt ineffable and ancient…”
The abbot stops, then notes how he’s long been attracted by all things religious. But then corrects himself slightly…pointing out how that fascination of a “human” mind-related bent, and not from what he terms “the institutional heart.”
Join the family! 
