Anusha Enryu Fernando was born in Sri Lanka to a Theravadin Buddhist family. Her grandparents founded the Vipassana Meditation Centre located in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1957. She began practicing Zen Meditation with Hogen and Chozen Roshi in 2007, and became a dharma holder in 2021. She holds a BA in Religious Studies, specializing in Buddhism and Hinduism from McGill University, and a Masters of Arts in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia, specializing in Sanskrit. In her dissertation, she translated a Sanskrit poem of the life story of the Buddha, called the Padyacudamani. Enryu has been a teacher and performer of Bharata Natyam, a form of Indian Classical Dance, for the past thirty years and is the founder and Artistic Director of Shakti Dance Society. She has also been the book purchaser at Banyen Books and Sound, Vancouver’s iconic spiritual and metaphysical bookstore, for the past twenty-eight years. She is the mother of an adult daughter and lives with her husband, parents, and multiple furry friends in Vancouver, Canada.

For more information about the Zen Community of Oregon and the Shakti Dance Society, please see the below links:

https://zendust.org/

http://www.shaktidancesociety.com/anusha-fernando/

We talked about the connections between Bharata Natyam and zazen, generosity as an expression of practice, learning Sanskrit and translating the Padyacudamani, Jizo Bodhisattva and the Jizo Garden at Great Vow Zen Monastery, the creative and meaningful challenges of cooking and eating what is given during sesshin, and the importance of remembering the joy of practice.