Zen and the Mystic Impulse: Reflections on the Teachings of Willigis Jäger, Benedictine Monk, Mystic, and Zen Master

Conceivably, if one wants to study Zen, one would wish to travel to China or Japan. One could even find a number of Zen temples and centers in North America that frequently offer retreats, short and long.

Arnie Lade, a teacher specializing in complementary and energetic healing living in Victoria, British Columbia, chose Germany. Lade traveled to Holzkirchen, a small village in Bavaria, to study with Willigis Jäger. When he asked why he made such a journey, he replied, “Yes, there are many Zen Masters in North America, but there is only one Willigis Jäger.” In the foreword to this volume, theologian Franz Nikolaus Müller calls Jäger (1925–2020) a “master of spiritual life” (Lebensmeister).

Jäger, a German Benedictine monk, drew from both Christian and Zen teachings to inspire thousands of people from various faiths. Deeply inspired by a spiritual revelation while visiting a church with his mother before he was even in school, he knew his life’s direction. When grown, he joined the Benedictine community and began his monastic pursuits. After being ordained as a priest, he traveled to many countries, but his deeper interest in Christian mystical writings and practice (though not exactly encouraged by his superiors) remained. He studied the mystical teachings of Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila among others. Father Hugo Lasalle, a Jesuit priest who lived in Hiroshima, Japan, introduced him to the lineage of Zen masters Sogaku Harada and Hakuun Yasutani, which was later continued by Yamada Kaun Roshi.

Jäger received permission from his Benedictine superiors to move to Kamakura, Japan, and begin an inten­sive training under Yamada Roshi, who was one of the few Zen masters who accepted non-Buddhists as students. Some pioneering Zen masters in North America, such as Philip Kapleau Roshi, Taizan Maezumi Roshi, and Robert Aiken Roshi, have come from this Sanbo Kyodan lineage.

In his Zen practice, Jäger had experiences of profound awakening. He called it the “unfolding of a flower,” likening his experience of emptiness to the “nada, nada, nada” (“nothing, nothing, nothing”) of John of the Cross. His studies culminated in 1980, when Yamada Roshi gave him authority to teach Zen.

Lade has wonderfully captured Jäger’s teachings in Zen and contemplation. This is Lade’s own personal mystical journey. Throughout the book, Lade also quotes from many other great mystics and teachers.

Mysticism is a path of transformation. Lade draws from what Jäger taught as a journey to fulfillment without emphasizing a particular practice. One studies koans, and one also uses prayer. Jäger taught that there is more to meditation than just sitting. He taught the two fundamental methods for entering silence and the ground of being that are most common in Christianity, Zen, and mystical traditions. They are called “gathering” and “emptying the stream of consciousness

Gathering involves focusing on a specific point, such as the koan mu in Zen, Om in yoga, Allah hu in Sufism, or Christian prayer. Emptying involves becoming aware of a vast, nonreactive state of mind that opens the door to a refined consciousness. Whatever arises is not followed but released.

Lade also talks about two other teachers that shaped his spiritual life: Haidakhan Babaji from India, Reverend Master Meiten, a Zen Buddhist dharma teacher. Together with Jäger, these teachers pointed Lade in the same direction: toward enlightenment.

I don’t know whether I have done justice introducing Jäger. Maybe a one-line review would be: get this book and read it!

Fall 2026 – by Dhananjay Joshi

by Michael Beas

from http://www.thebookrevue.com

Arnie Lade spent fifty years practicing and teaching acupuncture and energetic healing, and somewhere in the middle of all that he encountered Willigis Jäger, a Benedictine monk, priest, and Zen Master whose teachings would quietly reorganize everything Lade thought he understood about spiritual life. Zen and the Mystic Impulse is his account of that encounter, and it is one of the most genuinely humble and luminous books in the current contemplative literature.

The figure at the center of the book is remarkable in his own right. Willigis Jäger was not a man who inhabited the boundaries between traditions; he dissolved them. A Catholic Benedictine and a fully authorized Zen teacher simultaneously, he spent his life pointing toward what he called the Sophia Perennis, the universal spiritual connection underlying all religious traditions. For Jäger, the mystic impulse was not the property of any particular faith. It was the deep human yearning for connection with something beyond the self, and it called to people regardless of the path they walked.

What makes Lade’s treatment of these teachings so trustworthy is the intimacy behind it. This is not a scholar writing about a subject. It is a student writing about a teacher who changed him, with all the specific, irreplaceable texture that kind of relationship carries. Richard Bryan McDaniel, author of The Story of Zen, called it deserving of a slow, reflective reading, and that assessment is exactly right. The book rewards patience. It is not trying to impress you. It is trying to create space, which is a considerably more difficult thing to do on the page.

At 133 pages, it does not overstay its welcome. Lade knows that the kind of wisdom Jäger embodied cannot be explained into someone. It can only be pointed toward, and he points with great care.

For anyone who has sensed that the mystic impulse exists in themselves but has never quite found a tradition that fully holds it, this book is a gentle and genuinely expansive guide toward that deeper belonging.