He continued to study, teach, and meditate, traveling to San Francisco, Green Gulch Farms in Marin County, Tassajara Zen Center, Great Vow Zen Center, and eventually to Japan to spend a month at a Zen Temple. In 2008, Dave was ordained as a Buddhist priest. and 13th Street, and then to its current location at 1605 Heights Blvd., where it is now the Auspicious Cloud Temple of the Houston Zen Center, and Setsuan Gaylen is the Abbot. HZC did indeed grow with the arrival of Setsuan Gaylen Godwin as teacher, first moving to a bungalow at Heights Blvd. He continued to study, meditate, attend retreats, and work to grow HZC with his dharma sisters and brothers. Dave was named Yazan, which means Wild Mountains, an apt moniker.

In 1997, he participated in a ceremony called a Jukai, where students dedicate themselves to the precepts of Buddhism, and are given their Buddhist names. Dave took the advice to heart, and started sitting with the group, attending their Sunday night meditations at the First Unitarian Universalist Church, becoming an active member.

He strongly suggested that Dave start meditating with the Houston Zen Community. In the mid-1990s, Dave attended a retreat hosted by the Houston Zen Community at the Margaret Austin Center in Chapel Hill, TX with Tenshin Reb Anderson from the San Francisco Zen Center, who took him on as a student. He and his friend Craig Learned travelled to Korea to visit temples and meet with his Korean teacher, Myo Bong Sunim. Friendships that started there continued till the end of his life. In the early 1990s he started meditating with the Southwest Chogye Zen Academy, a Korean temple in West Houston. In 1990, he and Luanne welcomed their daughter Anna, whom Dave always said was his best teacher. He won several teaching awards, and was renowned for his “Science History Corner” which supplied his students with historical data that they could use for extra credit on their exams. In his last years at Baylor, he was the Physiology Course Coordinator and Research Course Coordinator in the School for Health Professions, where he taught students in the Physician Assistant, Nurse Anesthetists, Orthotics & Prosthetics, and Genetic Counseling programs. He stayed with Baylor in several different roles until he retired in January 2020. This early sojourn laid a foundation for later, dedicated practice.įinishing his PhD in November 1984, he married Luanne Novak and started working for Baylor College of Medicine in the Department of Anesthesiology, starting off doing OB Anesthesia research. When his year in Antarctica was over, he decided to spend time at the San Francisco Zen Center and Green Gulch Farms. While in Antarctica, using Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind as a guide, he started a meditation practice. There were other adventures, including one with a penguin that sought refuge in his Zodiac, only to be followed by a very hungry leopard seal.ĭave’s interest in Buddhism flowered early with exposure to Alan Watts at the age of 14. He also managed to get himself banned from the continent, due to an adventure that took him and his friend Bob far outside the five-mile limit in a Zodiac. Never one to turn down an adventure, he flew to Valparaiso, Chile and took an icebreaker to Palmer Station, Antarctica, where he spent the year collecting what he said was the largest land animal on that continent – a small wingless fly that would freeze each winter and then come back to life. While in graduate school, he was offered the opportunity to spend 1981 in Antarctica doing cryobiology research. He was accepted, and worked closely with his adviser, Dave Clarke, PhD, a relationship that continued throughout Dave’s life. After a couple of years he applied to graduate school in Pharmacology at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy.

In 1975, he moved to Houston, and began working as a clinical lab technician at a commercial laboratory. He obtained a Master’s degree in Marine Botany, and taught science at several schools in the RGV. Dave and his mother, a high-school biology teacher, moved to San Angelo for his first year of high school, then to the Rio Grande Valley, where he finished high school in Edinburg and graduated from what was then called Pan American University, now part of UT RGV, with a BS in Biology. They lived in Longview, Denton, and Irving. He was raised in Kentucky, first on his grandparents’ farm near Centerville, then in Owensboro, until the family moved to Texas. Dave Johnson was born in Hammond, Indiana on Januto Katherine Basham and Thomas Porter Johnson.

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