Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, given the night after the midterm elections, Roshi Joan Halifax speaks into a precarious moment in our national and global culture. Rights are under strain, immigrant families live in fear, and the earth bears the cost of an economy built on extraction. She sees a nation at a crossroads, able to tip toward deeper harm or toward real healing. Relief, she warns… Source

In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton explores papañca, the Pali term for the way the mind turns experience into ever-multiplying stories. Most of the time we don’t notice this happening. A narrative takes shape, and we accept it as simply the way things are. The Madhupindika Sutta, or Ball of Honey Sutra, points to this unchecked proliferation as the root of conflict. Source

In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity, meditation teacher and author Jack Kornfield explores freedom as something already ours rather than a reward for spiritual effort. Many of us treat practice as a self-improvement project, a dutiful effort to become better versions of ourselves. Yet beneath the shifting dramas of body, emotion, and thought lies a timeless awareness no circumstance can… Source

On the sixth and final day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Kathie Fischer takes up a koan in which a monk asks Zhao Zhou a sweeping question about oneness, only to hear about a shirt he once made. Kathie hears in that reply the meeting of form and emptiness: the one returns to the many, and the many are always particular. “We don’t live in generalizations,” she says. “We live in the… Source

On the fifth day of the Fall Practice Period sesshin, Sensei Shinzan turns to an exchange between Zhao Zhou and his teacher, Nanquan. Shinzan reads the story as a gentle test of how deeply insight has settled into the body. Realizing that every activity is practice is not the same as expressing that realization through action. Insight becomes real only when it comes through naturally… Source

In this Wednesday night Dharma talk, given on the fourth day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Cynthia Ryotan Kear explores how Zhao Zhou understands “leaving home.” For the Tang dynasty master the departure from home was never only about robes, shaved heads, or monastery walls. The deeper renunciation is of the dwelling we build in our minds: our fixed ideas… Source

In this Dharma talk, given on the third day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer offers gentle guidance on meeting thoughts in zazen. She invites us to sit like a grandmother, with a wide lap for every rambunctious or troubled grandchild: the squirmy, the grumpy, the crying. We can sit with each one, seeing and loving, without getting caught up in their stories. Source

In this Dharma talk, given on the second full day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Shinzan returns to Zhao Zhou, the Tang dynasty master whose teachings have shaped this season of practice. Through two of Zhao Zhou’s koans, he gently loosens our inclination to be critical of our own practice. In sesshin we may come face to face with our limitations and insecurities… Source

In this Dharma talk, given on the first full day of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period Sesshin, Sensei Cynthia Ryotan Kear turns to a poem echoed throughout the koans of Tang dynasty master Zhao Zhou. Reading Robert Olson’s translation of the well-known Xinxin Ming, or Mind of Absolute Trust, Cynthia shows how readily our likes and dislikes split the wholeness of experience. She reminds us how sesshin… Source

In this Zazenkai Dharma talk during Upaya’s Fall Practice Period, Sensei Shinzan explores confidence in practice through Zhaozhou’s first meeting with his teacher Nanquan. Asked whether he has seen the temple’s standing Buddha—whether he has awakened—the young Zhaozhou replies that he sees a reclining Buddha, Nanquan himself, resting before him. For Sensei Shinzan, this exchange points to an… Source