Toni Packer

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Toni Packer was born 1927 in Germany to a German father and Jewish mother. Her status as half-Jewish in Germany during the war years had a profound impact on her outlook. What her eventual fate might have been is hard to say as she and other members of her family were on the death list.

It was only through the intervention of a collegue of her father's with the Gestapo that a respite was granted.

The family moved to Switzerland after the war where she met Kyle Packer, an American exchange student whom she later married and moved to America with. Kyle passed away several years ago.

They have a son and grandchildren.

A story she tells of her father's love of scenery is a view when driving he would describe as summum bonum.

She is a former Zen teacher who helped found the Springwater Center for Meditative Inquiry and Retreats in Springwater, New York and currently occupies the senior administrative position there.

Prior to this endeavor, she studied and taught at Rochester Zen Center and also was a student of Philip Kapleau for 13 years.

Toni had departed from Rochester Zen Center amid disillusionment with her perceptions of the dogma, methodology and ritual.

Springwater Center is not Buddhist, but calls itself non-denominational, and eschews notions of practice.

"Meditative inquiry" is a contextless inquiry into the nature of reality and unsettling to normative human intelligence with its social referencing.

Simply put, it is earnest, diligent, and thorough questioning: questioning of everything that we have been conditioned to think we "know" about the nature of our lived personal experience. This is, in her words, "seeing without knowing": simply allowing the mind to attend, without imposing any judgements whatsoever.

Toni Packer is constantly misunderstood or misrepresented by people in Buddhism, she eschews any notion of technique and is not a Buddhist.

There has been an attempt on her life, which may have contributed to her avoidance of publicity.

The Zen style sitting meditation at the center is entirely voluntary, as is attendance at the talks during retreats.

She does however appear to have a view of herself as having some fundamental shift of perspective into 'nonbeing' through meditation, and may still have the conventional zen view of seated meditation for this purpose.

Another story she tells is of looking into the blue eyes of a baby in a pram as a child and wondering what "on earth it was."

Because Springwater carried a lot of personnel from the Rochester Zen Center, there is quite a bit of accommodation to people who really seem unable to break entirely with the Zen way of thinking. Her own views are different and not so constrained.

The Springwater center is vegetarian which is a carry over from the Rochester Zen Center, though there do seem to have been some exceptions to that rule. She is not personally a vegetarian.

Her talks have an intensely visual lyric character, conveying a sense of boundarylessness.

The Springwater Center is a place of great beauty with sparkling streams and green leafy trees that just blow through the soul...........