Welcome to HeartLandZen

Meditation and discusion will be offered at Rev. Sunya's house Thursday evenings from 7 to 8pm. You must RSVP and recieve confirmation to attend. All are welcome. Please send email to heartlandzen@yahoo.com.

Rev. Sunya Karuna was born Steven Scott Oswalt in 1956 in Hutchinson Kansas. He joined the Navy at 17 as a hospital corpsman, and worked for a few years as a bone identifer at the La Brea Tar Pits in LA. He received a BA in Fine Arts and began teaching at CSULA, among other places, including a year at Chino Women's Prison and worked as a telescope operator at Mt. Wilson Observatory for a few years. He started tattooing in '89 at Sunset Strip Tattoo and continued there for 12 years. He then flew helicopters around L.A. for a few years, found Buddha, and met his new wife Marilyn.

He was fully ordained as a Zen Buddhist Priest at the International Buddhist Meditation Center on December 11, 2004 and given the transmission name of Tich Tam Khong. He earned a Master's Degree in Philosophy and is currently a Ph.D candidate. Once he entered Buddhist seminary, he began painting Buddhist iconography, exploring Buddhist teachings through color and contemporary western imagery.

Artist's Statement
Reverend Sunya sees himself as an iconographer - a maker of images that convey a dialogue between the east and the west. His work, which he calls Heartland Zen, celebrates the cultural exchange between Buddhism's origin in the east, and its reinterpretation in the west. He adds to the diversity of the Buddhist art community through his images that are at once deeply respectful to their roots, and unique in their new direction.

Born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and raised in Colby, Kansas, his midwestern roots are evident in the images he uses. An archetypal image that is seen repeatedly in this series is the sunflower. Reverend Sunya uses it as a reflective response to the more eastern lotus. Both flowers convey the same message - the lotus, which thrives in muddy swamps, and the sunflower, which grows on the midwestern prairie, will grow where nothing else will. One eastern, one western, both are symbols of endurance, and thriving in difficult circumstances.

Style
Surrealism was chosen because of its dreamlike quality. In combining the worldly and the other-worldly, the absolute and the relative, a sense of the ineffable is communicated.