Niklaus Brantschen

1986 Brantschen met Jerry Brown in Japan and held inspiring conversations, 1987 he practised Zen together also with him.

From 1976 he made regular education stays for Zen studies in Kamakura, Kamakura/Japan with Hugo Makibi Enomiya-Lassalle and Yamada Kôun Roshi. There, meetings with Heinrich Dumoulin, Jerry Brown, Willigis Jäger, Johannes Kopp. In 1988 he was given the teaching competence for Zen by Yamada Roshi, in 1999 he received the confirmation of a Zen master ("inka shōmei") from Tetsugen Bernard Glassman.

Between 1973 and 1977, Brantschen was assistant manager of the educational institution Bad Schönbrunn near Menzingen, until 1987 he was its manager. For the next five years he worked as a student minister at different colleges in Zürich. In 1993 he positioned the educational institution Bad Schönbrunn new as a centre for spirituality and social consciousness and renamed it Lassalle-Haus. In 1995, together with Pia Gyger, he founded the Lassalle-Institut, an institution in the fields of Zen, ethics and leadership, which they both led until 2002. Within the institute both are involved especially in the project Jerusalem – Open town for learning of the peace in the world which takes them regularly to Jerusalem and to the UN in New York.

When he was 22 years old he joined the Society of Jesus. After the novitiate in Villars-sur-Glâne he received the licentiate of the Munich University of Philosophy in 1964. As practical studies he worked in 1964-67 as an educator at Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria followed by three years of theology studies at the university of Fourvière, Lyon, France and a fourth year at the University of Tübingen, among others from the professors Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann, Walter Kasper, Hans Küng; Licentiate work about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 1970 he celebrated his first Mass (liturgy) in Randa. From 1973 he made a certificate study in adult's education in Munich as assistant of meditation teacher Klemens Tilmann, followed by meditation courses with Karlfried Graf Dürckheim.

Niklaus Brantschen (born 25 October 1937 in Randa, Valais) is a Swiss Jesuit, Zen master of the White Plum Sangha line and founder of the Lassalle-Institute within the Lassalle-House in Bad Schönbrunn/Zug, Canton of Zug. He is co-initiator of the Jerusalem-Project.