Encouraging Words

Essay

Sangha relations: Kodoji Family Picnic Weekend

There is a ‘precious heart-to-heart connection sangha members experience’. SANGHA Gillian Coote, Roshi recently reminded us at the AGM: ‘In this time of increasingly virtual relationships, the importance of face-to-face communication in handing on the live coal of the Dharma, as Robert Aitken Roshi did, is ever-greater. Turning up for sangha events maintains these connections, not turning up erodes them.  Sangha

Read More
Podcasts

Ordinary Mind is the Tao

How can I find my way in the Dharma? How shall I proceed?  This is the gist of the sincere questions Chao chou put to his teacher, Nan Ch’uan. Their dialogue—found in case 19 of the Wu Men Kuan– is most instructive and illuminating, not to say evergreen. Ordinary mind is the Tao! We’re in the midst of spring. Flowers are blooming,

Read More
Podcasts

Shikoku Pilgrimage

Zen student Janet Selby takes us on a journey to Japan to walk from temple to temple on the Island of Shikoku. She describes what it’s like to take every step as it comes and enjoy not knowing what may lie ahead. Along the way she draws the landscape, people and temples, and sometimes even what is served for breakfast.

Read More
Podcasts

Riley Lee shakuhachi concert

Riley Lee is one of the world’s foremost performers, composers and teachers of the shakuhachi, an end blown bamboo flute. The shakuhachi has been used by some Zen sects as part of their meditative practice, calling it suizen (“blowing meditation”). In the shakuhachi tradition a collection of original pieces of music (“honkyoku”) are passed down from teacher to student in

Read More
Essay

Frankland River Forest – 41A & B* – Diana Levy

It was war and the giants fell despatched by a scadgett, take this coupe and make of it a timber soup says the Forestry, so a yellow machine with a saw and a claw tracks its way to 41A, and the man inside with a job and a plan cuts the elders and shoves them, they’re pushovers, claws them into

Read More
Podcasts

Why Zen & a World in Crisis Need Each Other – David Loy

The highest ideal of the Western tradition has been to restructure our societies so that they are more socially just. The most important goal for Buddhism is to awaken and put an end to dukkha “suffering” due to the delusion of a separate self. Today it has become obvious that we need both: not just because individual transformation and social transformation complement each other, but because each project needs the other.

Read More
Podcasts

Zazenkai – Watch out for the Snake! Allan Marett

Xuefeng’s Turtle-nose Snake, Case 22, Blue Cliff Record Here we encounter four great Chinese Zen masters, Xuefeng, Changqing, Xuansha and Yunmen doing a little snake dance together. It’s a lovely case because it shows us both the humour and the insight of these old fellas. Look out for that snake! It might bite you … if you’re lucky. This talk

Read More
Essay

Faith in Mind – Subhana Barzaghi

The opening paragraph in a much loved text Faith in Mind by the Third Zen Patriarch, Seng T’Sang, are very affirming and have direct implications for our practice. The Supreme Way is not difficult it simply avoids picking and choosing. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised, Make the smallest distinction however and heaven

Read More

post categories

Popular Class

Benefit Concert
Bushwalking Zazenkai
Creative May