2025 Taitetsu Unno Memorial Lecture: Ruth Ozeki

The Taitetsu Unno Memorial Lectures are hosted annually by the Institute of Buddhist Studies and, this year, cosponsored by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, and made possible through the generosity of the Unno Family. Rev. Dr. Taitetsu Unno (1929-2014) was a prolific author and scholar, a graduate of the Univeristy of California, Berkeley, and taught in the filed of Buddhist studies at the University of Illinois Rev. Dr. Unno was also an ordained Shin Buddhist minister in Nishi Honganji tradition, and he devoted his career to working in Shin Buddhist communities across North America.

We’re pleased to announce that this year’s speaker is acclaimed author and Zen practitioner Ruth Ozeki. Her talk is entitled “To Study the Self: Zen, Autofiction, and the True Dharma ‘I.'”

Ruth Ozeki is a novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest, whose novels have been translated and published in over thirty countries, garnering international critical acclaim for its ability to integrate issues of science, technology, religion, environmental politics, and global pop culture into unique, hybrid, narrative forms. She is the author of four award-winning novels: My Year of Meats, All Over Creation, A Tale for the Time Being, and The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her nonfiction work includes the short memoir, Timecode of a Face and the documentary film Halving the Bones. A longtime Buddhist practitioner, Ruth was ordained as a priest in 2010 and received Dharma Transmission from her teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer, in 2023. She is affiliated the Everyday Zen Foun­dation and lives in Western Massachusetts, where she taught creative writing at Smith College and is the Grace Jarcho Ross 1933 Professor Emerita of Humanities. She is currently finishing a collection of stories, The Typing Lady, and Other Fictions, which will be published in 2026.

The talk begins at 4:00pm at the Alumni House on the UC Berkeley Campus. Please join us for this special event.