#  Busshin Nash, MDiv '25 

 



   ![Busshin Nash, MDiv ’25](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/hds2/files/busshin-nash-cir-detail-page-650.png?itok=YJOiGaM4) 

 

*Photo courtesy of Busshin Nash*For Busshin Nash, MDiv ’25, religion has long been synonymous with service. The grandson of two pastors, he grew up going to church every Sunday—a place imbued with many happy memories, and “where values were instilled in me really early.” When Nash was 10, his father became the medical director at Room in the Inn, a homeless shelter founded by Catholic priest Charles Strobel. Each year, his family would spend Christmas and Thanksgiving at the shelter or a church, serving food to people experiencing homelessness, and “that was always part and parcel of the way that we would celebrate those holidays.”

When Nash was a teenager, he moved away from Christianity. He became interested in Chinese language and culture, leading him to visit China and later to take courses on Asian religion at Middlebury College. Reflecting on this now, Nash says that being exposed to Buddhism and Taoism gave him a “different vocabulary” which helped him recognize the grief that he felt in leaving Christianity.

“I had really embraced an atheist materialism,” he recalls, “and there was a kind of sadness in not being able to express the yearning I felt for connection and union. And so, by learning Buddhist and Taoist ideas, I could express these things again. It was a joyful discovery to learn that those yearnings and longings were still very much alive and present in me.”

The summer after Nash’s junior year, he discovered Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community (BLMZC) while living and working in a local homeless shelter. Nash began attending meditations at Bread Loaf and continued to deepen his connection there throughout his senior year. His post-graduation plans to live at Bread Loaf and work at the shelter following his graduation were accelerated by COVID-19. In spring 2020, he moved into the monastery and, along with others in the Bread Loaf community, began working to care for some of the most vulnerable neighbors in the area. “The lineage that BLMZC belongs to is one of Bernie Glassman Roshi, who is famous for his expression of Zen through social action,” explains Nash. “Roshi believed that the practice of Zen was to be lived in the world, and in the service to other beings."

The continued parallels between his practice at BLMZC and his work with the local unhoused population led Nash to HDS. [Field education](/academics/ministry-studies/field-education "Field Education"), says Nash, “was a big part of why I ultimately landed on HDS because that requirement really illustrated to me a commitment to service." In his first year, Nash did his field education at the Cambridge Outdoor Church, an ecumenical Christian church for homeless and street-involved men and women in Cambridge. This year, his field education is taking place at [Peace House](https://www.cambridgepeacehouse.org/about), a monastic residence in Cambridge "focused on spiritual development and community building.”

His goals in working at Peace House are threefold: to gain small-scale, nonprofit grassroots administrative management experience; to work on guiding meditation; and to do community building at an organizational level. He reflects, “I've really been able to develop the skills that I wanted and to work closely with the monks who live there, which exposes me to a different tradition of Buddhism that I'm not as familiar with.” In addition, he says, “field education is where what I’ve learned in the classroom enters the world. It's important for me to see that these ideas have a way of manifesting and can be used to serve other people.”

With a year remaining in his Master of Divinity degree program, Nash is considering a few different professional avenues. Regardless of what he chooses, he is certain that the skills he has acquired from field education will benefit him. He appreciates that donors’ generosity has helped to support his time at HDS and future aspirations. “In Buddhist practice, we're often asked to engage in a kind of generosity where we may never know the result—to learn to see the generosity as a practice in and of itself,” he says. “I'm so grateful to the donors. I see what they've done as a profound expression of the kind of generosity I'm still working towards. To be a recipient of that kind of generosity has given me a kind of focus and clarified for me what my priorities ought to be.”

—*by Sarah Rubin*



 



 

 See also:- [ HDS Fund Community Impact Report ](/page-type/hds-fund-community-impact-report)