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“My heart grew hot within me, and as I meditated, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue.” Psalms 39:3 |
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Recent Dharma Essays
 The Chinese year of the dragon arrives on January 23. Happy new year from Fa Guan (John ... John Stubbs | 11 January 2012
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 It’s a new year; a time for looking forward, and a time for looking back.
Each time we celebrate “New Year’s Day” we are giving ourselves the opportunity to begin anew. It’s a chance for a fresh start. It is, for many of us, an opportunity to release feelings of guilt and frustration over things that didn’t go so well in ... Yin De Shakya | 30 December 2011
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 The plum trees blossoms In the middle of winter.
There is no robe no color.
In practice there is no time, no culture, no sex.
In pure existence the breath takes what the intellect can never think.
There is no attachment or detachment.
The pure being, thoughtless with no move,
moves the world, and within, the world becomes a silent universe,
beyond the realm of reality and ... S. Elliot Sozan | 30 December 2011
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 Students who come to my weekly Dharma talks (or who meet regularly with me in private) are often confronted with my insistence that they view the world more holistically. This is typically triggered by one or more meetings in which claims are made that a “big picture” perspective is fine philosophically, but typically has little relevance to one’s personal suffering. “H... Fa Lohng (Koro Kaisan) | 12 December 2011
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 As anyone versed in Chan’s history knows, the hermitic life is a common one passed through by many of China’s most famous Chan teachers. In fact, all mystical traditions commonly find their members, at some time in their life, retreating from society.
For the mystic, living a reclusive hermitic life is more typical than not. Stonehouse (石屋, or “Shiwu”) was renowned ... Fa Dong Shakya | 5 December 2011
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 Zen’s hua-tou practice recently seems to be enjoying a renaissance among the small contingent of Zen Buddhists speckling the globe. In part, this may be due to the growing awareness that this was Hsu Yun’s personal favorite Zen practice that he spent much of his life advocating. One of the best contemporary descriptions of hua-tou practice has recently come from St... Chuan Zhi | 4 October 2011
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 Introduction
In 1912 the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Brühl published a collection of works that gave us a new model with which to view the relationship between self and other. He offered new insights into many of the problems that are encountered by people in relationships of all kinds. Carl Jung further expanded his models, weaving them into an even more complex ... Chuan Zhi | 22 September 2011
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 The genes that code for proteins in our human species are remarkably similar, often nearly identical, to those of many other species across the animal kingdom. It makes sense, considering that throughout our natural history human beings and other animals have shared the same environments and competed for the same resources in a quest for survival. Having so much in ... Fa Zhao | 18 September 2011
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 Hua-tou is a Chinese term that can be translated as “critical phrase”. In Korean, hua-tou is pronounced hwadu and in Japanese as wato. I mention this in case some one has read or heard the term in a Korean or a Japanese context to know we are discussing the same subject. The hua-tou is a kind of meditation though one ... Stuart Lachs | 15 September 2011
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Reader's Favorites
 THE FLOWER SERMON:
Toward the end of his life, the Buddha took his disciples to a quiet pond for instruction. As they had done so many times before, the Buddha's followers sat in a small circle around him, and waited for the teaching.
But this time the Buddha had no words. He reached into the muck and pulled up a lotus flower. An... Fa Che Shakya
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 Whenever a religion enters a new region dominated by an ethnic culture differing from that of its originating source, a certain amalgamation of ideologies, ethicalities, as well as prevailing myths and superstitions of the newly introduced religion and the antecedent religions takes place. Buddhism is an especially interesting case, as it has spread world wide and taken on many different ... Chuan Zhi
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 The Great Way is gateless, approached by a thousand paths. Pass trough this barrier, you walk freely in the universe. One of the principal Zen texts from thirteenth century China is a collection of koans entitled Wu-wen kuan (Mumonkan). This translates into English as The Gateless Gate, or what we Westerners would think of as an open ... Fa Lohng
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 Zen requires that we maintain our sense of awe and wonder, that pure curiosity about the things we see and experience, that search for meaning and significance that is so apparent in the works of ancient man. We cannot allow technology to dull our awe and jade our curiosity about the meaning of life. We cannot look upon our ancient ... Chuan Zhi
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 When we allow ourselves to move far away from the center, we experience the pain and bitterness that the Buddha described in his First Noble Truth. The cause of that distress, he said, is attachment. A Zen practitioner can feel anger, sorrow, or physical pain just as he can experience joy and laughter. But once his immediate response to the ... Chuan Zhi
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 My first encounter with a Zen teacher happened when I was in my late twenties. Zen had been an interest of mine for nearly a decade before this chance encounter with a person of Zen. I had never thought seriously about actually DOING Zen, but I liked reading the philosophies that came from Zen literature. Doing Zen was, well, something ... Chuan Zhi
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 Deep inside each of us lurks a presence that is our full human potential, but it remains hidden from us - an aspect of the unconscious. It hides because of our fear of it. Its aspect is wisdom, understanding . . . compassion, yet it remains hidden. The question we must ask ourselves is, do we remain closed up in ... Chuan Zhi
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 Meeting Tang Yousheng
Twenty-one years old and from my village, yet!So bright and filled with fresh ideas.No wonder you gained such a high post in Tenchong.I seemed ancient when I came to Chan.
We simmered tea and talked and talkedComing up with one great line after another.We hung up a lamp and read old poems.I only just met you and yet I knew you... Master Hsu Yun
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 from Reflections, Compiled and Edited by Dhamma Garden
A visiting Zen student asked Ajahn Chah, "How old are you? Do you live here all year round?" "I live nowhere," he replied. "There is no place you can find me. I have no age. To have age, you must exist, and to think you exist is ... No Ajahn Chah
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New to Zen/Chan? Try starting with one of these . . .
 Everyone who enters Zen's Gateless Gate, has a story to tell. Mine begins one summer evening when I received a call from a friend who had recently moved to another state. "I found a Buddhist Priest who teaches Zen." He told me. "Last night she gave me a pranayama exercise called the Healing Breath." I was immediately interested. I had a hobby, of sorts, of collecting meditation exercises. I was master of none but proud of my collection, nonetheless.
The ...
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 In order to prepare ourselves for meditation, we must first begin to put our lives in order and act in accordance with what is right and good, both for us and for others. It is no simple task, for it requires that we act caringly instead of selfishly. It's not what we do that's as important as the motivations behind what we do. It's not whatwhy we think what we think that needs to be explored. It's not ...
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 When we stop to analyze our daily lives, we discover how many of our activities are constructed to assuage a fear of being alone. We wait in lines at restaurants and take several hours to eat a meal that we could quickly have prepared at home. We go out to crowded malls shopping for things we don't even need. We go to a book store to browse the shelves for half an hour and spend two hours in the coffee ...
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Deep inside each of us lurks a presence that is our full human potential, but it remains hidden from us - an aspect of the unconscious. It hides because of our fear of it. Its aspect is wisdom, understanding . . . compassion, yet it remains hidden. The question we must ask ourselves is, do we remain closed up in our shells, living in the ego-world where our actions are dictated by unconscious forces, or can we push those shell ...
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 How do we begin with Zen? We don't start climbing Mt. Everest from the third base station. We start at the very bottom, climb a bit, set up camp, wait for a few days to let ourselves adjust to the altitude, then move on up again, slowly, step by step. This is the same way we proceed in Chan. We start at the bottom, and work our way up, slowly, step by step. To do otherwise will beckon sure failure. ...
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 Suffering is integral to the Zen path. It is, in fact, a prerequisite. Zen is not an easy path and we must be highly motivated in order to travel it. In physics as in Zen, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. No human being wants to suffer. All desire an end to pain. It is suffering and its end that supplies a person with the necessary impetus to get onto the path. And it is the memory of ...
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 What is the nature of Self? In Chan, the answer is a spiritual one, dependent on self-reflection, and one that cannot come fully until we achieve a degree of spiritual awareness. In the secular domain, we can investigate Self in terms of what it is not - it is not the self we identify as our ego. We all recognize the characteristics of ego - they manifest as arrogance, pride and conceit. While it's easy to see these characteristics in ...
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 Many spiritual seekers get frustrated as they become lost in the myriad approaches to enlightenment presented in Buddhist literature and by various spiritual teachers: take this path … or that path; study this sutra, then that sutra; do these things … don't do those things. There is also much discussion of psychology, philosophy, science -- a billion things to occupy the mind and distract from the simple, direct approach to Self-realization. While all these things are, in and of themselves, ...
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 As westerners brought up in different religious traditions and cultures, we won't ever have the same Buddhism as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, or the Vietnamese. Nor should we. Our psyches are shaped by western cultures, not eastern ones. A religion will invariably speak uniquely to each culture that adopts it, but is there value in abandoning the core foundation of a spiritual tradition? Giving thanks to the ocean that supports the boat we ride in, acknowledging and honoring ...
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