Zen

Let Go, Turn Around, Return Home

I can’t remember enjoying an autumn as much as I have this one. The golden light, the cool freshness of the air, the daily colourful progress of liquid ambers on our street, trees we’d actually never fully taken cognizance of before. The virtue of relative confinement has meant coming to appreciate the vividness of the local geography, what is right

Read More

The Whole World is Medicine

Gillian Coote, roshi explores Yunmen’s koan in light of the pressures and stresses of our lives, especially the climate emergency, and ways we may awaken to these dharma gates. This talk was given at the SZC Spring sesshin in 2019

Read More

Honouring our Ancestors

Gillian Coote, roshi tells the stories of some of our ancestors who appear in the dedications we chant in our sutra service, including Choro Nyogen and his internment poems (written in the USA during WWII). She offers the koan ‘Mu’, and reflects on this monk’s – and our – doubt that, though all beings by nature are Buddha, this can’t

Read More

Ordinary Mind – Nothing in the Way

Settling into samadhi on the zafu at sesshin 
on the first day is often attended by a jungle of thoughts, fleeting or solid – daydreams, schemes – 
and here lies our greatest challenge. In this teisho, Gillian talks about different ways to gather focus by using koans, breath counting or shikantaza. This talk was given on Day 1 at SZC’s

Read More

Old age, sickness & death

“In all of the worlds, what is most wondrous? That no man, no woman, though they see people dying all around them, believes it will happen to them” King Yudhisthira, Mahabharata, Hindu epic poem. Jill Steverson talks about the privilege and challenges she experienced being with her mother through her journey of frail age and recent death. Also how sharing

Read More

Spring

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” Rainer Maria Rilke For the last three months – all of winter – I have been practising in a different dojo, with a different daily routine and a body that must only bear weight on one leg so as not to interfere with its miraculous

Read More

Dogen & Buddha Nature

The question, “What is Buddha?” or, “What is Buddha Nature?” is a constant theme within Buddhism. Dōgen, the founder of Sōtō Zen Buddhism in Japan, has something interesting to say on this topic. Dōgen tells us that: Buddha Nature and becoming a Buddha always occur simultaneously. Paul Maloney, roshi explores in this talk, some of the implications of this statement,

Read More

post categories

Popular Class