A collection of dharma talks, events, interviews and other media from Zen Mountain Monastery and the Zen Center of NYC. Please scroll down for all available talks. Subscribe via: iTunes | Google Play
A collection of dharma talks, events, interviews and other media from Zen Mountain Monastery and the Zen Center of NYC. Please scroll down for all available talks. Subscribe via: iTunes | Google Play
A student asks, “Do people these days need enlightenment or not?” Working from the Book of Serenity and other texts, Shugen Roshi deeply investigates the many facets of this question. A true path, he says, acknowledges the painful reality of suffering but remains grounded in an unshakeable faith in the basic wholeness of every person.
Featured Event
What does it mean to bow towards an altar? Or a tree? Or a meal? In this dharma encounter led by Zuisei Sensei, students bring their understanding to the matter.
Featured Video
On March 3, 2019, Shugen Roshi introduced the chief disciple for the new training period and spoke about confronting oppression as a path of liberation for all beings.
Featured Interview
More from the Buddhist Poetry Festival… David Hinton talks about how he came to dedicate his life to translating ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy.
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Blue Cliff Record, Case 87
Zen Mountain Monastery, 3/24/2019
In this talk, Shugen Roshi uses Yunmen’s pithy teaching on medicine and sickness as a way of looking at the profound and challenging truths of non-attachment and non-duality. Although we may have many ideas about what these words mean, it is only through direct study and practice that we can really understand and embody them. This is the path to genuine compassion and relaxed freedom.
Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei
Zen Center of New York City, 03/24/2019
Hojin takes up a poem by Pablo Neruda and connects it to Dogen’s fasicles Uji on time-being and the Ango’s fasicle on refraining from unwholesome actions. Hojin looks at business, reminding us as Dogen says, time is not merely flying away.
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Zen Center of New York City, 3/17/2019
Shugen explores one of the values established for the Sangha’s “Beyond Fear of Differences” work: trust. A cultivation of confidence in the Sangha’s working together to achieve mutual liberation, trust is essential and not separate from compassion and love.
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Zen Mountain Monastery, 3/14/2019
This Fusatsu talk invites us to reflect deeply on Dōgen’s teaching from the Spring Ango study fascicle, “Refrain from unwholesome action. Do wholesome action. Purify your own mind. This is the teaching of all buddhas.” Shugen Roshi looks into how all action natures (positive negative, and neutral) are unborn, undefiled, and are reality– but manifest in various ways. Study of our thoughts, words, and actions offers insight to understanding intentions, desires, and karma. With an undefended heart, refraining from unwholesome action, how is “the power of practice immediately actualized” on the immeasurable scale Dōgen describes?
Jody Hojin Kimmel, Sensei
Zen Center of New York City, 03/14/2019
Inquiring into Dōgen’s fascicle of our Spring Ango study, “Refrain from Unwholesome Action,” this Fusatsu talk explores the service itself, the first pure precept of refraining from harmful action, and atonement as letting it all in.
Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi
Blue Cliff Record, Case 37
Zen Mountain Monastery, 3/10/2019
How do we meet the moment, in the moment, when it is occurring? To say that there is nothing in the three worlds (form, formless, desire) is to understand that no material world exists outside of mind. Mind itself is without any substance of its own, yet practice involves examining mind. This talk explores how this case and teaching can help us not be bound by anything — by identity, the past, nor intellectual inquiry.
Forum at the Zen Center of New York City, 03/10/2019
Learn more about the Beyond Fear of Differences initiative.
Ron Hogen Green, Sensei
Zen Center of New York City, 3/10/2019
Hogen Sensei offers a talk introducing Dōgen’s fasicle “Refrain From Unwholesome Action”, and relates it to the issues of injustice we face as a society.
When launching the Buddhist Poetry Festival in 2018, David Hinton was one of the first writers who came to mind and it was no accident that we scheduled him to open up the event on the first morning. Hinton bridges past and present, distinguishing himself as one of the foremost translators of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy working today. His translations strive for accuracy while coaxing the aesthetic potential out of each phrase. The results are fresh takes on early Daoist and Buddhist literature, inviting us into the heart/mind of practitioners who lived centuries and even millennia before today.
After many years of publishing highly lauded books of translations and essays about translation, Shambhala Publications recently brought out an original collection of Hinton’s own poetry, influenced by the hermits, scholars, and monastics of antiquity that he’s studied so deeply. At the Buddhist Poetry Festival, he read from that new collection, Desert, on the cusp of its release. He also read from No-Gate Gateway, a recent translation of Master Wumen’s koan collection, and from Mountain Home, an anthology of ancient Chinese poetry that helped cement Hinton’s reputation when it was first published in 2002.
Following the reading, festival director Hokyu JL Aronson sat down with David Hinton for this live conversation that also included the festival audience.
A video of the reading, featuring Achong Jusan Chen reading some of the poems in their original, classical Chinese:
Learn more about David Hinton on his website, or click here to visit the festival’s website.
Danica Shoan Ankele, Monastic