Former BCA President Rick Stambul, 78, Dies

Former BCA President Richard (Rick) Stambul, who was known for his passionate commitment and support of Shin Buddhism and the BCA, has passed away, the BCA announced. 

Stambul, a resident of Sherman Oaks, California, died on Nov. 5 at the age of 78. He served as BCA President in 2018 and 2019 and was a Sangha member of the West Los Angeles Buddhist Temple.

Stambul practiced law for 41 years in Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C., with a focus on issues of social justice. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Los Angeles,  (UCLA), and his law degree from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he was a Teaching Fellow.

He called himself a “foot soldier” in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and working in Mississippi to register African Americans to vote.

In the 1980s, he worked as an attorney doing research on the legal team that brought the Coram Nobis petition to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking redress for the more than 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans who were uprooted from the West Coast and incarcerated in mass detention camps during World War II.

Stambul talked about how the struggle for civil rights and the Japanese American internees’ redress movement led him to Shin Buddhism.

Among his many accomplishments with the BCA, Stambul is credited for his key role in the years-long effort to finally convince the California Supreme Court to disburse over $1 million from the estate of Richard Bloomquist to the BCA and Institute of Buddhist Studies (IBS). Stambul and Rev. Dr. David Matsumoto, the BCA Minister Emeritus and IBS President Emeritus and fellow attorney, were instrumental in the Bloomquist estate efforts.

Stambul also was noted for his keen eye in spotting new leaders in the BCA and offering them encouragement. Most notably, he convinced Terri Omori to become the first woman to lead the BCA in March 2022 — in the BCA’s 123-year history at that time.