Recordings

Water is often used as a metaphor for Dharma. The choice to immerse ourselves completely or have a sip now and then is a personal one. How do we choose? How do we honor our own choice and the different choices others make?

Categories: Dharma Talks

Categories: Dharma Talks

We are in the process of discerning matters great and small throughout our lives. As Buddhists, how do we approach the “big” decisions about the shape and form our lives will take? Is there a difference between “deciding” and “discerning”? And what constitutes “success”? Thomas Bruner shares his process of discerning whether to ordain as a monk while a postulant at Dharma Rain last year.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Looking at Prajna Paramita (Great Perfect Wisdom) requires that we look at the difference between an acquired knowledge of ideas vs a dynamic knowledge of that which is.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Categories: Dharma Talks

Categories: Dharma Talks

Bukkai’s talk carries a long thread of love of mountains in zen writing and mountains in themselves. She makes suggestions for study of the walking of human beings and the walking of mountains.

Categories: Dharma Talks

How do we live with the universality of suffering? Genko follows Kyogen’s path in working with the Buddhacarita, a mythical retelling of the Buddha’s life story and enlightenment. We’ll talk about myth and read some of the story and explore how we work with the facts of sickness, old age, and death.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Gyokuko explores the sacred and the mundane, and pays homage to Spring in this Sunday’s talk.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Starting Monday evening, the Zen Center enters into a week-long retreat in preparation for our Jukai ceremony next Sunday. Is there a way to be part of this retreat even if you are not able to participate at the Zen center in person? For this week’s Dharma talk, Shintai offers suggestions and encouragement for deepening your practice during our Jukai sesshin wherever you are.

Categories: Dharma Talks

The word courage comes from the Latin coeur, which means ‘heart’ – it originally meant to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. Shin’ei speaks to fully inhabiting our lives, seeing things all the way through. Who is it you think you are and whose story is it anyway?

Categories: Dharma Talks

Sometimes the troubles of the world overwhelm us, and we sink into despair. We may feel depressed or angry as we see the suffering around us. Despair is actually a crucial experience in practice. How do we work with this state and the accompanying emotions? How do we move forward with compassion to ease suffering when it seems that nothing can be done?

Categories: Dharma Talks

Bukkai’s talk is based on the Buddha’s last words “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves.”

Categories: Dharma Talks

In Dogen’s chapter Kajo he says that the thoughts and words of the ancestors are “everyday tea and rice.” Having just returned from a sesshin in which this fascicle, which translates as “Everyday Activity,” was studied, Seido offers some reflections on Dogen’s meaning within the context of our lineage tradition. On Valentines Day, this talk will explore the less “romantic” aspect of the relationship between teachers and students and the everyday face to face exchanges that facilitate our awakening.

Categories: Dharma Talks

A recurring theme in Kyogen’s Dharma Talks was finding or discovering what is ours to do. This Sunday David Choten Robinson will present a student talk on how his practice and work with this theme informed his ability to meet opportunities and challenges while living in Uganda in 2012.

Categories: Dharma Talks

This Sunday Kakumyo will speak about his upcoming kessei term as part of the preparation for becoming co-abbot. His taking up this challenge suggests a question for all of us: How do we blend the depth of insight and the routine of integrity with the complexities and inadequacies of our embodied lives? Drawing beauty from the palette of practice with virtuosity is a lifetime challenge that lands on us as individuals and as a sangha.

Categories: Dharma Talks

What are the markers of maturity in the practice? How do we define this subjective term? We teach that practice is enlightenment, there are no stages of enlightenment. Yet there are real markers of development in practice, qualities we develop and can recognize over time. One is generosity, giving the self freely. A sense of humor (especially about oneself) is another. What else? The list can be surprising.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Categories: Dharma Talks

Gyokuko is finding a new way to look at frugality.

Categories: Dharma Talks

What does it mean to be dignified? We use the word freely and in many contexts, but may find that a definition is not easy. The Buddhist view of dignity is a little different from the conventional one. Is dignity an inherent quality? What does it mean to act in an undignified manner? Are there situations in which one’s dignity is taken away by conditions? We will consider these questions and share a few stories about how we express this subtle, important quality in our daily lives.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Following our Founder’s Day Service last week, we continue to commemorate with gratitude the great compassion that has been shown to us by our ancestral teachers. Fumyo explores the model for practice given to us by Shitou Xiqian (Sekito Kisen), our eighth Chinese ancestor. In his “Song of the Grass-Roof Hermitage,” Shitou shows us how to relieve our suffering by moderation, letting go, and relaxing completely. His gentle and insightful style of practice left a legacy that we follow to this day.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Once a year we hold an all-night vigil in honor of our founders Keido Chisan and Jiyu Kennet, both of whom died during the first week of November. This year, for the first time, we will hold this vigil in the Sodo, as we carry their work forward. Morning service on Sunday will be a special Founders Day service, and Kakumyo will talk on this theme.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Resonant of our recent Segaki retreat, this koan invites a changed relationship to one’s “ghosts” often understood as unresolved karma arising in the present. The dharma talk is about how we care for “ghosts” and what it means to save or release them. While many of us struggle to let go of these unbidden appearances from past, many of whom arrive on the cushion, the path to really letting go is not necessarily an obvious or linear one. Come join us Sunday and bring your experience of this year’s celebration one week after feeding the hungry ghosts in the new Sodo.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Birth and death are moments in time – and yet the fact of our birth and death is called the Great Matter. How do we contemplate our own extinction from this life? The Buddha addressed his death directly. We will talk about the simple, profound questions of dying, caregiving, grieving, and planning for the inevitable.

Categories: Dharma Talks

We say that we begin practice as a way of addressing our own suffering. We continue practice for the sake of others. Over time, our practice evolves, so that it becomes for the sake of the Dharma itself. How does this work, and what does it look like? Genko explores these questions and more.

Categories: Dharma Talks

In zen practice we often try ‘to come back to center,’ or ‘to calm down,’ or ‘to open up,’ because if we’re in such a state then our thought, speech and action causes less problems. These kinds of shorthands refer to varieties of experience that we’ve learned to trust. But isn’t that conditioning? A subtle kind of picking and choosing our experience? How does that relate to delving ever deeper into the unconditioned? Join us Sunday to explore.

Categories: Dharma Talks

Keeping the Precepts can be challenging when decisions need to be made and disagreements arise, whether in the world of work or here in the temple. As the temple has grown, more and more of the needed work is done in meetings in committees. How do we apply Right Speech to our work? To what extent do we speak our minds and to what extent to we prioritize harmony – whether within the sangha or at the work place? Gyokuko explores these questions and more.

Categories: Dharma Talks

We approach Big Mind with our small minds; we find our greater selves through the vehicle of the small self. But much of the time, we live and experience the world within that small self. How do we keep going when it seems like nothing changes? What is the meaning of “still” and “here” when we think about perseverance?

Categories: Dharma Talks

“Decisions are the junctures where our lives meet the world. They define the trail we leave behind.” While the source of this quote is unclear, it is worth investigation at the beginning of Ango. With inspiration from Dainin Katagiri to Dr. Seuss, Bukkai will follow several threads concerning how we decide.

Categories: Dharma Talks

In this student talk, Yoan focused on concrete practice steps for releasing clinging and aversion with a fabricated sense of self and cultivating that which gives rise to equanimity and joy

Categories: Dharma Talks

When Cecil the lion was killed recently, there was an outcry around the world. Why are we sometimes able to feel compassion for a creature so distant from our daily lives? Why are we sometimes unable to summon up compassion for our next-door neighbor? This talk will explore how a widening circle of compassion grows with practice, and explore some of the apparent conflicts that compassion can raise in daily life.

Categories: Dharma Talks

A Theravadin teaching talks of four stages in the path to Nirvana: stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and arhat. Even though we don’t usually talk about the path this way in Zen, there is some value in looking at this very old teaching as it relates to our practice. What sign posts can we find on the path to let us know that progress is possible?

Categories: Dharma Talks