Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

Sensei Shinzan Palma talks about how to deal with discomfort and pain during sesshin, and asks the question, why do we put ourselves through a process that is so difficult? If we made it easier, we may have moments of peace, but there is no guarantee that we’re not going to see ourselves and experience the pain that that often entails. The word “sesshin” means to touch the heart-mind; to confront reality. The pain, self-doubt, and hindrances compose the field on which we learn to be more compassionate towards ourselves and in turn others. It is worth noticing, Shinzan suggests, that often when painful memories arise during zazen, especially during intensive sessions like sesshin, there is an opportunity to liberate these experiences that we’ve neither processed nor let go of. In Hongzhi’s words, there is no place other than ourselves, and sesshin provides a precious opportunity to realize what this place truly is. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

Sensei Kathie Fischer continues Upaya’s in depth investigation of Hongzhi’s teachings on silent illumination during its Fall Practice Period of 2022. Kathie explores the relationship between stepping back into awareness, prior to any “distinctions of shadow and light,” and stepping out into the world of delusion in a spirit of service, non-judgment, and love. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

Sensei Matthew Kozan Palevsky continues Upaya’s exploration of the teachings of Hongzhi, looking at the text “Thirty Years of Emptiness and Existence,” in which Hongzhi references the koan, Juzhi’s One Finger. “No place can be other than myself,” Hongzhi writes, referencing the famous story of Juzhi and his realization that he is filled with all that he needs, overflowing in fact, and that he doesn’t need to go anywhere else or be anyone else to live as a Buddha. The frustration, though, that Juzhi and most of the rest of us experience, of feeling that we do not have what we need to meet reality, to meet ourselves, and that we need to look somewhere else to find it, is a part of the path, a fruit even, Kozan insists, of sincere practice. “The activity of investigating our lives always includes frustration.” And on the path of realizing that reality is nowhere other ourselves, we’ll need the help of friends, of teahers, of sangha. Juzhi didn’t believe that he was filled with Dharma and all he needed was someone to point it out for him, and then he overflowed with life, with wisdom and compassion. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

In part 6 of Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts, Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski converse with program participants about grieving personal loss, including the tragic loss of suicide. The question is, how do we continue to love life, which Frank insists is the whole point of living, in the midst of such suffering? Exploring this question, Roshi and Frank read some of their favorite poetry on embracing the gift of life in the light of death. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

In part five of Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts, Frank Ostaseksi discusses the four Brahma Viharas or Divine Emotions (loving-kindness, compassion, joy with others, equanimity) as practices through which we cultivate a concentrated mind meeting an ever expanding heart, unbound by an preference. Roshi Joan Halifax describes how her contact with the Brahma Viharas through her friendship with Sharon Salzberg completely transformed her life, and how to practice the fourth Brahma Vihara, equanimity or loving all beings equally, with people we especially struggle with, whether they be certain family members or former president. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

 “It seems that you’re all getting attached to the empty field!” Sensei Shinzan Palma jokes when he asks the community in the zendo and online how they’re doing and gets only silence in return. Upaya has been studying the Hongzhi’s teachings on silent illumination as compiled in Dan Leighton’s Cultivating the Empty Field. Shinzan’s guiding question in his insightful exegesis of Hongzhi’s “The Cloud’s Fascination and the Moon’s Cherishing” is: How do we practice silent illumination or just sitting unselfconsciously? As soon as we try to practice silence and try to keep thoughts from occurring, we are only practicing self-narrative; the narrative of, “I want to be a good zen practitioner, and I want to be free of painful thoughts, and I want to gain enlightenment.” And all we are actually gaining is more thinking. Drawing from his own decades of experience sitting zen, and more specifically sitting sesshins, as Upaya is doing at the moment, Shinzan provides guideposts for how to practice the silence of silent illumination without self-consciousness and without the dullness that can easily accompany concentration practice. When we are all able to now only sit but also go about our daily lives resting in the moment as it arises and changes rather than trying to control anything, we’ll experience true silence, and out of this silence we may get a glimpse of what Hongzhi calls illumination. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

Sensei Kathie Fischer  gives the first Dharma talk of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period 2022 sesshin. She generously shares her experience and wisdom with us on sitting a sesshin, including how to practice with emotional turbulence, repressed thoughts and feelings rising to the surface, physical pain, the formal eating ritual of oryoki, and the much needed discipline of rest. She encourages us to face ourselves, even those parts of ourselves that we’d rather look away from, with a sense of patience, acceptance, and, if possible, even gratitude and wonder. Wonder is not something that just happens to us, Kathie reminds us. It’s a practice. It’s a choice. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

As we’ve explored the practice of silent illumination this Fall Practice Period we’ve come across the phrases “take the backward step” and “turn the light around.”. But what do these phrases, used by both Hongzhi and Dogen, actually mean? And how do we practice them? In his first Dharma talk as Sensei, Noah Kodo Roen invites us to engage these questions through a guided practice, in which we investigate exactly who or what it is that perceives: that sees, hears, touches the phenomenal world. We are constantly taking in sight and sounds, but where are those phenomena coming from, where do they go, and what is experiencing them? Here Kodo encourages us to have faith. Not faith in any abstract propositions about zen, but faith in the practice: keep coming back until you see, until you gain your own experience of what you really are. The purpose of our practice, Kodo suggests, is to discover this and to do so with each other. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

In part four of Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts, Roshi Joan Halifax guides us through a meditation designed to cut through the sense of loneliness and separateness that pervades so many of our lives. Frank Ostaseski and Roshi both share powerful stories of being with people who are dying, and how it is in facing death, our own and others’, that we will open to love. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

In the third part of Roshi Joan Halifax’s and Frank Ostaseski’s  “Love and Death: Opening the Great Gifts,” Roshi Joan tells a story about her teacher Thich Nhat Hanh falling in love as a young monk and how he learned about interbeing through the experience. Frank tells stories about lovers separating at the time of death and the healing, as painful as it may be, that can occur in these encounters through honest presence. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

“Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly, they are passed on unopened” -Rainer Maria Rilke This whole life is a place where we make real our dedication to awakening, in living and dying, in caring and being cared for, in loving and receiving love. Being completely and vividly present for the rich details of our lives and the lives of others is the means that we use to discover truth and come home to who we really are. Love and death then are experiences of discovery. This program, led by Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski, two pioneers in the end-of-life care field and long-time Buddhist practitioners, is an exploration of how we bring depth and dedication into our whole life and the life of the world. Through teachings, exchanges, and unique practices and processes, we explored the profound relationship between love and death, engaged practice and the role of love and compassion in how we serve others, different forms of love, how art reveals the connection between love and death, and practices that related to the power of impermanence and surrender. Episode Description: Roshi Joan Halifax and Frank Ostaseski introduce themselves and their program on the intimate relationship between love and death. You’ll learn about their experiences in end of life care, zen practice, and some of what inspires and sustains them day to day in their own lives. (This program began with a Dharma talk from Frank, Love is My Mentor, which we recommend listening to first.) To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: Love and Death 2022: Opening the Great Gifts

Upaya is in the middle of Fall Practice Period, studying the teachings of Hongzhi and the practice of silent illumination. The Caodong/Soto school of Hongzhi and Dogen, with its emphasis on just sitting, traces itself back to the 8th Century Chan (Zen) Master Shitou. Sensei Monshin Nannette Overlay brings her characteristic honesty, gentleness, and care to this Dharma talk on Shitou’s seminal poem, Song of the Grass Room Hermitage. Shitou’s Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage is a poignant and accessible poetic teaching on just sitting (or standing, walking, cooking, cleaning, and so on) in open awareness, relaxed yet responsive. This state of complete relaxation is ours naturally, prior to all of our attempts to actualize it. Sensei Monshin assures us that we will find our natural state, our Buddha nature, our mind before thinking, not by adding anything but by relaxing into the spaciousness of this moment. Let go of hundreds of years and relax completely. Open your hands and walk, innocent.  Is there anything you are unwilling to let go of? And who would you be without it? To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

Sensei Kathie Fischer continues Upaya’s exploration of Zen Master Hongzhi’s teachings on the practice of silent illumination. She describes how Hongzhi, teaching during China’s Song Dynasty, bridges the gap between the early Chan (Zen) of the Tang Dynasty and that of Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen. Kathie reads Hongzhi’s poetic teachings on the practice of just sitting with the following question: How do we practice zazen without either grasping at every thought and running away with every emotion, on the one hand, or judging our thoughts and emotions and rejecting them, on the other? She invites us to consider that we could engage our thoughts as we would the song of a bird, neither to be clung to nor rejected, but simply experienced. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

“The practice of true reality is simply to sit.” Matthew Kozan Palevsky continues Upaya’s exploration of silent illumination, or just sitting, discussing Taigen Dan Leighton’s collection of Zen Master Hongzhi’s writings, “Cultivating the Empty Field.” He invites us to consider what it could mean for us to cultivate the empty field, especially given that Hongzhi himself says that we cannot cultivate an enlightened mind. Why? Because it is already ours. The question then is, how do we discover and embody this Buddha Nature that is already ours? Kozan also discusses the historical connection between Dogen’s teacher Rujing and Hongzhi, who lived at the same time on the same mountain but in separate monasteries, both teaching and promoting the practice of silent illumination. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. For Program/Series description and to access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field

“Silent and serene, forgetting words, bright clarity appears before you. When you reflect it you become vast, where you embody it you are spiritually uplifted.” ~ Hongzhi Series Description: During this Ango, we will explore the teachings of the Zen Master Hongzhi, study his teachings on Cultivating the Empty Field translated by Zen Teacher Taigen Dan Leighton. Zazen (Shikantaza or Silent Illumination) is the core of our practice. Hongzhi Zhengjue (Japanese: Wanshi Zenji, 1091–1157) was a Chinese Chán Buddhist monk who authored or compiled several influential Buddhist texts. Hongzhi’s conception of “silent illumination” is of particular importance to the Chinese Caodong and Japanese Soto Zen schools; Zen Masters Hongzhi and Dogen established shikantaza firmly in our lineage eight hundred years ago. In these times, there is so much information and various kinds of meditations.  This study brings us back to the roots of our practice, to simplicity, to understand and experience the art of Just Sitting, learning to be intimate with the boundless life as an empty field, beyond duality, and separation. When practicing serenity and silence, the truth reveals itself. Practice Period (Ango or “peaceful dwelling”) is a traditional intensive training period common to most schools of Buddhism. Ango traces its history to the time of Shakyamuni Buddha and the early sangha. Each year, the community would gather together enabling everyone to deepen their practice and polish their understanding through the indispensable teachings of the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Sensei Jose Shinzan Palma gives the opening Dharma talk of Upaya’s Fall Practice Period 2022. He provides a primer on shikantaza, or just sitting, and an introduction to Zen Master Hongzhi and his revitalization of this practice, foundational to the Soto school of zen. You may have heard that shikantaza is an especially advanced practice, akin to the Tibetan Buddhist practices of Dzogchen and Mahamudra. Shinzan explains how shikantaza is profoundly simple and potentially difficult at the same time, and gives tips on how to approach “just sitting” gradually and as a practice of embodiment. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Upaya Podcast Series: SPRING PRACTICE PERIOD 2022: Cultivating the Empty Field