Michael S. Wolf

Michael S. Wolf was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1948. He attended Webb School (Bell Buckle, Tennessee), Stanford University, and Louisiana State University Law School. He has practiced law in Louisiana and other American jurisdictions since 1973. He is a member of the judicial bars of Louisiana, New York, and the District of Columbia. His earliest spiritual training consisted of Catholicism, eventually supplemented by the Christian Yoga of J.-M. Déchanet, the Joyous Cosmology of Alan Watts, and the Fourth Way of G. I. Gurdjieff. Since the early 1970s Wolf has been a student of buddhadharma, drawing his main influences from the Karma Kagyu tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and from the Soto Zen tradition of Japanese and Chinese Buddhism. His main dharma teacher was the late Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, abbot of Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Monastery, located in Woodstock, New York. Wolf resides in Baton Rouge with his wife, Lessie Johnson. They have a grown daughter, Elyse, who lives in Germany, and they are trying to age gracefully as Wolf pursues literary and legal projects and carries on a long-running campaign for civic and ideological reform.