Category: Zazen

For the past several years, I’ve been interested in inventing, constructing, and documenting the peculiar history of the Zazen Manufacturing Company, America’s largest and most successful manufacturer of Buddhist home appliances.

In the early 1930’s, the small group of monks who comprised the Zazen Manufacturing Company decided to move beyond their core business of meditation bells. The result was the Koan-O-Scope, a device which — like the kinetoscope — contained short reels of film which the viewer could advance at their own speed.

In the early 1970s, Zazen began work on their most ambitious product yet: the Interconnector Model 1. But a fire at the factory put the project, and Zazen, in jeopardy.

Following the destruction of the Interconnector Model 1, work immediately began on an improved model, the Interconnector 2. Restarting from scratch allowed the Zazen engineers to rethink a number of issues that had plagued the first model. Within a year they had perfected a new design that was more reliable, cheaper, with a higher quality…