Zencare Podcast

Editor's Note: As you may have heard, the New York Zen Center is moving! On November 30th, we'll begin a new chapter in our new home at 330 7th Avenue, Suite 1801, just 5 blocks north of our current zendo. Koshin Sensei and Chodo Sensei will be away for much of November, so we have a wonderful lineup of guest teachers and community events ahead, including a procession from our old zendo to the new one. And as we prepare for this next chapter, we invite you to help us settle into our new home by supporting our “A Thousand Hands” year-end fundraising campaign.And now, a fitting reflection from Koshin Sensei on what it means to sustain our practice and care for one another through times of change...What happens to our practice when no one is watching? When the teacher leaves the room, does our practice deepen or disappear?As the New York Zen Center prepares to move into its new home, Koshin sensei reflects on what it means to belong to a sangha, and the responsibility each of us carries to keep the Dharma alive.Drawing on the Buddha's final teachings to Ananda, Dogen's writings on continuous practice, and his own experiences as both student and teacher, Koshin explores the difference between relying on our teachers for guidance and depending on them to carry our practice for us.

Editor's Note: This recording of Chodo sensei’s talk offered at the recent Contemplative Care Retreat began a little late, so from the very first moment you'll hear Chodo already in the middle of a story about his mother and his childhood. It's an abrupt, intimate opening that somehow feels perfectly suited to what follows. We hope this talk moves you as much as it moved us.What are we really afraid of losing when we contemplate death? Is it the people, places, and pleasures we love? Or the feelings of safety, comfort, and belonging they give us?Drawing on stories from his turbulent childhood, his journey into sobriety, a terrifying skydiving experience, and the small pleasures of everyday life—from his beloved triple espresso to the morning sunlight streaming through his apartment—Chodo examines how easily our desire for pleasure becomes a fear of losing it.Through the Buddha's Five Remembrances, Chodo invites us to recognize the countless small endings we experience each day: a conversation, a meal, a beautiful morning, even the person we were yesterday. Rather than turning away from life's pleasures, can we learn to experience them fully, without clinging?As Chodo reminds us, “Perhaps the deepest freedom is not getting to keep what I love. Perhaps it's discovering that I can love what I cannot keep.”

“Many Buddhists reject even healthy, compassionate engagement with the world because they haven't figured out how to be in the thick of the world's conditions without developing ill will.”What if the things that get in the way of our practice aren't signs that we're doing something wrong, but invitations to pay closer attention?In this dharma talk, Jisho Siebert explores the Buddha's five hindrances: sense desire, ill will, sloth and torpor, restlessness and worry, and skeptical doubt. These familiar states show up both on and off the cushion: we wish the present moment were different, we grow frustrated with ourselves or others, we become caught in anxiety about the future, or doubt our capacity to practice.Drawing on her own experiences with parenting, worry, and the everyday challenges of being human, Jisho invites us to approach these hindrances with curiosity rather than judgment.Towards the end of the talk, she introduces the hindrances' “healthy cousins”, the nourishing alternative states that the hindrances themselves point towards when we are able to abandon our grasping of them.View the images Jisho shares at the end of her talk here.Jisho Sara Siebert Sensei is a Soto Zen Buddhist priest who was led to Buddhism by the suffering around her and in her work to prevent domestic and sexual violence. Her path to understand suffering and joy led her to Los Angeles – where she first met her teacher, Gengo Akiba Roshi, then to Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Uganda, monasteries in Japan, and Haiti. She is recognized as an International Zen Teacher (Kokusaifukyoshi) by the Soto Shu and teaches at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa. 

"The teacher's role is not to give you what you want. Their role is to help you set down your greed, so that you're joyful no matter what happens."On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, Koshin Sensei reflects on accountability: to ourselves, to each other, and to our practice.He shares a classic Zen story: a young student named Tangan keeps asking his teacher, Sengai, for permission to leave and study elsewhere, and every time he gets a smack on the head. When permission finally comes, Sengai gives him one last smack. Koshin explores why this is actually a story about love. A teacher's job isn't to make us feel approved of, but to never give up on who we really are.Drawing on Leonard Cohen's “Who by Fire,” inspired by a traditional Yom Kippur prayer, and on the Zen practice of daily atonement, Koshin asks simple but challenging questions. Do our thoughts, words, and actions match? Where are we going through the motions instead of truly living our practice? And who are we leaving out because we're certain, scared, or ashamed?

“We don't have to save everyone, solve everything, or understand the whole mystery of our lives. All we have to do is be in this moment, this breath, this body. Then bow, let go, and listen.”Chodo Sensei shares the story of Kakua, one of the first Japanese monks to travel to China and study Zen. A recluse who preferred remote mountains to monastery fame, Kakua was eventually summoned by the emperor to demonstrate the true teachings he'd acquired. Kakua thought for a moment, reached into the folds of his robe, pulled out a flute, and blew a single note.Then he put the flute away, bowed, and walked out. The emperor was dumbfounded. And that's the whole story.What did Kakua refuse to do? He refused to perform Zen, to make it into something impressive, to assemble a bundle of credentials and understandings to prove himself. He just offered this one complete note. Because the true teaching, Chodo explains, is the understanding that has no words, no thoughts, no ideas. Just whatever is occurring in this moment.Drawing on his years as a hospital chaplain, learning to pause at the door and let the room tell him what was needed rather than entering with too many words, Chodo reflects on how the most compassionate thing we can offer is often not a performance of “being helpful”, but simple presence.And in true Chodo fashion, he ends the talk with a tribute to the life of the great bodhisattva we lost this week, Dolly Parton.

“The robe of liberation does not hide our imperfections. It doesn't erase our history. It's stitched together from many different pieces of cloth, just as our lives are stitched together from moments of joy and grief, cruelty, clarity, confusion, generosity, and fear.”On the final full day of sesshin (silent retreat), Chodo sensei takes up a story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones about Shichiri, a Zen master confronted by a thief wielding a sword. Shichiri gives the man his money, reminds him to leave enough for the next day’s taxes and even asks him to say thank you. Years later, after serving a prison sentence, the thief returns and becomes his disciple.The story raises a profound question: What happens when we refuse to reduce another person (or ourselves) to the worst thing they have ever done?Drawing on his years offering prison dharma at Sing Sing, Chodo reflects on meeting men whom the world had labeled murderer, dealer, rapist, or offender. Zen practice does not erase harm or eliminate accountability, he reminds us. But neither does it allow a single action, wound, or identity to become the whole story of a human life.During sesshin, another kind of thief appears: the voice that says you're not worthy, that steals the present by dragging it into the past, that insists we already know who we are. As practitioners prepare to receive the Buddha's robe, Chodo offers a different understanding. Jukai is about trusting that you have never only been the story you've told yourself. The robe of liberation weaves in every aspect of your being.

“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 sensei turns to a classic story 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 ends simply: “At these words Banzan became enlightened.”What would it mean to realize that whatever life is presenting to us right now—in the butcher shop, on the street, or the middle of a difficult relationship—is the best piece? Even what we don’t like. Even what makes us reactive. Even what we’ve been struggling with for fifty years. Can this moment, too, be whole and complete, nothing lacking?Koshin reflects candidly on his own recent experience of rage and impatience in a long-standing relationship. He knows the teaching intellectually, and yet finds himself completely reactive anyway because understanding the dharma in our heads is not the same as living it in our bodies.Practice, he reminds us, is not about eliminating pain or pretending everything feels good. It is about meeting what is here without adding another layer of resistance, judgment, or story. We inquire. We soften. We ask: What is this moment here to teach me?And perhaps, again and again, we discover the strange joy of becoming endlessly receptive to being changed.

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?

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?Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching on great effort, Chodo explores what a vow actually is while also reflecting 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.In our daily practice at NYZC, we can see certain unreachable vows at work. The Bodhisattva vows that we chant: “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them” or “the Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to attain it”. Together we promise to walk, even though it is unlikely we will arrive at any destination. In times of outrage, fear, grief, and numbness, Chodo reminds us that we can return to our vows. Even when we fail, even when we fall short, there is a direction to our lives. With some guidance and help from good spiritual friends, we understand the gap between how we're living and how we aspire to live is our unique (and universal) place of practice.

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.