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by New York Zen Center
GROUNDED IN THE DHARMA. DEVOTED TO CONTEMPLATIVE CARE.
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- Today29 min
Awakening in the Butcher Shop | Koshin Paley Ellison
“The circumstance of having a life of practice doesn't change it. We have to be endlessly humbled and endlessly receptive. And what a joy! That, to me, is the joy of practice: to be endlessly receptive to being changed by whatever kind of meat you're getting.”On the 26th day of NYZC's summer practice period, Koshin Paley Ellison shares a teaching from another classic tale from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: When Banzan walked through a market, he overheard a customer demand the best piece of meat. The butcher replied: “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.” The story concludes with: “At these words Banzan became enlightened.”How can we realize that whatever life is presenting to us right now, including what we don't like, what makes us reactive, what we've been struggling with for fifty years, is the best piece? Is complete?Koshin shares his own recent difficulties with rage and impatience with a relationship he's had for many years. He knows the teaching intellectually but feels completely reactive anyway. Because understanding the dharma in your head is not the same as living it in your body.But ultimately, the practice isn't about eliminating pain. Instead, we are encouraged to meet life with its many aspects and not add stories on top of it. We inquire and soften into each moment and ask: what is the teaching for me in this? And to find, again and again, the strange joy of being endlessly receptive to being changed.
- 1 weeks ago55 min
“Is That So?” Hakuin, Equanimity, and Seeing All the Perspectives | Jisho Sara Siebert
Editor's Note(s): Just a few weeks ago, Jisho Siebert, teacher at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa offered the first guest-teacher dharma talk for our summer Commit to Sit. It's an incredibly refreshing take on a classic Zen story which you may have heard a number of times and we are glad to share it with you here. Alongside it, we are very delighted to announce our three Fall courses are now open for registration, the first of which features the guest teacher herself:The Diamond Sutra: Offering Care Without Grasping with Jisho SiebertCatch Your Mind: How to Live in a World on Fire with Koshin SenseiLiving an Ethical Life: A Study of the Zen Precepts with both Koshin Sensei and Chodo SenseiNow, a bit more about Jisho's moving talk... “I found this story really annoying for a long time.”That's how Jisho Siebert opens her exploration of one of Zen's most famous teaching stories, the tale of Master Hakuin, falsely accused of fathering a child, who responds only with “Is that so?” When the truth is revealed a year later and the baby is returned, he says the same three words again.On the surface, it's a story about equanimity. But Jisho invites us to slow down and ask the questions the story leaves out: What was this like for the young woman? For the baby, separated after a year of bonding? For the fish market worker who never came forward? For the parents, the villagers, the storytellers who passed this down, erasing women's perspectives along the way?Drawing on decades of crisis response and violence prevention work, Jisho shows how equanimity in action looks like curiosity instead of judgment, questions instead of arguments, and fierce care that doesn't collapse into either passivity or reactivity. When the whole fabric of a community shifts (as it does for those involved in this classic tale) so does the experience of those within it. There's no one who isn't involved, so how can we act like it?
- Jun 29, 202626 min
A Quiet Orientation of the Heart | Chodo Robert Campbell
Editor's Note: In celebration of Commit to Sit starting this week and Chodo sensei's birthday last week, we share his talk from this past Winter Commit to Sit. Enjoy and may it offer some comfort and guidance for you. In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei asks a deceptively simple question: Without a vow, how do you live? Not just react, not just move from one obligation to the next, but actually live in a way that feels rooted, intentional, and awake.Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching on great effort, Chodo explores what a vow actually is as he reflects on 36 years of sobriety and three decades of Zen practice, both sustained not by certainty but by a simple, sometimes shaky turning. A vow taken one breath, one moment at a time.The Bodhisattva vows point to the same living direction: sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them, which means we're never finished. The Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to attain it, which means we're not vowing to arrive, but to walk. We can come to understand that the gap between how we're living and how we aspire to live is our place of practice.In times of outrage, fear, grief, and numbness, Chodo reminds us: when your own mind is unreliable, you can return to your vow. We're not declaring perfection. We're saying, even when I fail, even when I fall short, there is a direction to my life. What is yours?
- Jun 18, 202642 min
The Potter and the Fire: Using Suffering as a Gate | Koshin Paley Ellison
Editor's Note: In honor of our Commit to Sit practice period starting July 1st and our Wholehearted Sesshin (silent retreat) in August, we share this opening talk from the first night of both our Winter Commit to Sit and our Winter Sesshin in January. May it serve you! In this opening talk, Koshin Sensei invites us to consider how the very places where we suffer can become gateways into deeper intimacy with life. Drawing on the story of a potter who transformed his relationship to fire after being badly burned, Koshin reflects on courage, practice, and the ways we often use suffering to separate ourselves from others rather than meet the world more fully.As the sangha entered a period of study with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s Becoming Yourself (the guiding text for the last Commit to Sit), Koshin reminds us that practice is not a self-improvement project. It is about releasing our fixation on fixing, meeting life directly, and taking responsibility for how we show up in thought, word, and action.Through teachings from Shakyamuni Buddha, Prajnatara, Bodhidharma, Rujing, Dogen, and Suzuki Roshi, this talk points toward a practice of immediacy, intimacy, and rigorous honesty: becoming our true selves for the benefit of all beings, including those who will inherit this practice long after we are gone.
- Jun 11, 202629 min
What Must Change, What Must Remain: The Future of Dharma | Koshin Paley Ellison
“How you bow is not just for you.” In this recent dharma talk, Koshin Sensei reflects on what it means to practice consistently: to be the same person regardless of who's watching, what conditions you're in, or whether you're getting what you want.Drawing on Dogen Zenji's teaching on the Four Embracing Actions (giving, loving speech, beneficial action, and identity action), Koshin explores what should remain unchangeable in practice and what needs to adapt as NYZC prepares for a major transition. At the core is a distinction borrowed from teacher Aoyama Roshi: Fu'eki, what must not change (the practice of freeing ourselves from small self and habitual mind), and Ryuko, what can evolve to meet the moment.What are the things in your practice and your life that must not change? And what might you need to change in yourself to allow practice to enter you?
- May 22, 202628 min
Finding the Buddha in Others | Chodo Robert Campbell
“The precept does not ask us to be passive in the face of injustice. The question is always: from what place do we speak?”In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei explores the sixth and seventh precepts: not speaking of others’ faults and errors, and not elevating oneself while blaming others.What can seem like simple teachings become a profound invitation to examine the energy beneath our speech. Are we speaking from compassion, clarity, and care? Or from reactivity, self-protection, and the need to be right?With honesty (and more than a touch of humor), Chodo reflects on how quickly the mind moves toward comparison, judgment, and disparagement, and how this habit creates suffering for ourselves and others. The practice, he reminds us, is not to suppress truth or avoid difficult conversations, but to slow down, look at our motivations, and learn to speak in ways that are true, timely, kind, and beneficial.This is the work of becoming “that which we already are”; people capable of finding the Buddha in one another, especially those who challenge us most.
- May 12, 202622 min
Doubt Digs Up the Whole Blue Planet | Chodo Robert Campbell
“The purpose of practice might be to enter the question so fully that it begins to reshape us.”What is the purpose of practice after all? In this talk on doubt and the practice of not-knowing, Chodo Sensei shares a teaching from his favorite Zen teacher: Zen Master Raven, the wise old bird from Robert Aitken Roshi's animal sangha stories.When Badger asks what the purpose of practice is, Raven doesn't answer directly. Instead, he asks: “Do you have an inkling?” When Badger hesitates and says “I'm not sure,” Raven responds: “Doubts dig up the whole blue planet.”Rather than treating doubt as something to overcome or push away, Chodo invites us to embrace it. Can you live with the doubt? Can you doubt the doubt? Can you feel it in the body rather than trying to answer it from the head? The talk and teaching is about letting doubt do its work of digging, of opening, of uncovering what's been with us all along, waiting for us to stop long enough to feel it.
- Apr 29, 202629 min
Not Turning Away from this Fractured World | Chodo Robert Campbell
“In Zen practice, we talk about bearing witness; not as a passive act, but as a form of deep engagement. To really see what's happening. Not escaping into numbness, but also not hardening into fixed views.”In this recent talk, Chodo sensei reflects on the fourth and fifth precepts (truthfulness and not clouding the mind) as practices for living in a fractured and overwhelming world.Speaking to the instability, violence, and uncertainty of our current moment, he invites us to notice the ways we reach for certainty, numbness, outrage, or distraction when the truth feels too much to bear.But what can we do when we are stuck in the “sh*t show” (a term Chodo would never use)? He offers bearing witness as a courageous and compassionate response: staying close to what is true, pausing long enough to discern clearly, and meeting the world without adding confusion to confusion.
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GROUNDED IN THE DHARMA. DEVOTED TO CONTEMPLATIVE CARE.
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