Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

Episode Description: Sensei Robert explores the third Great Vow, translated variously as "reality is boundless; I vow to perceive it" or "Dharma gates are boundless; I vow to enter them." He regales us with the gobsmacking adventures that first brought him through the "Dharma gate" -- including hedonism and illness in Asia, fool's errands to remote monasteries, a mysteriously forgetful Australian monk, harassing soldiers, stick-wielding village mobs, buckets of salad dressing dumped on his head, and an epic hitch/hike to Tassajara. He goes on to examine the subtle meaning of entering Dharma gates: how "moving through gates" is such a felicitous image for meeting the newly arriving moment, and how we must always step through with our whole body and being -- since we have no choice but to feel (not think) our way into this moment. Please note Part 1 of this Series is Episode # 1040. For Teacher BIO, please visit Part 2. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Living and Practicing in Vow Sesshin Series: All 4 Parts

Episode Description: Sensei Robert looks closely at the second Great Vow, "delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to transform them." He speaks of "delusion" as the deep and daylong habit of believing confidently in our limited perspective. He says the vow is unfulfillable by design -- failure and repentance are vital to the life of vow. In that light, he discusses Okumura's subtle notion of zazen as repentance: the act of coming back and merely, entirely receiving our experience. Please note Part 1 of this Series is Episode # 1040. Bio: Do-An Robert Thomas is a Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Rev. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of the modern spiritual classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and founder of the first Soto Zen Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Robert’s dharma name, given to him when he was ordained as a priest in 2000, is Shi-Zan Do-An (Lion Mountain, Path of Kindness). He has been practicing Zen Buddhism since 1993, and in 2008 he received “Dharma Transmission” from his teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer. From 1994 to 2000 he trained intensively as a Zen monk at Tassajara, practicing intimately with many Zen teachers (including Tenshin Reb Anderson, Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Shisan Edward Brown, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Ryushin Paul Haller and others). He was ordained as a Zen priest in 2000 by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and has enjoyed studying and practicing with a number of Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist teachers. Today, Robert leads Zen retreats and workshops, and gives public lectures throughout the year. The expression of his Buddhist practice in his teachings has been focused on helping people from all walks of life to realize the practical benefits of Zen practice and meditation (zazen), and extend the Zen mind, with its qualities of openness, clarity, and flexibility, into every moment of their life. For many years Robert has been in a leadership role serving the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) sangha, one of the largest Buddhist communities outside of Asia, and since 2005 he has been the President and CEO, overseeing the administration of all three SFZC practice centers (Tassajara, Green Gulch Farm, and City Center), as well as guiding its mission of bringing the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha to the world. Since 1993, Robert has traveled extensively in Asia, most often with his wife, Samantha Ostergaard, studying and practicing in the Theravadan and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and at monasteries and practice centers in Thailand, India, Nepal, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. Robert’s university training is in fine art and filmmaking, and he has had a career as a film/video director, a magazine editor/creative director, and a small business owner. He continues to draw as often as he can and enjoys watching movies. He loves to hike and run regularly, and also takes great pleasure in cooking and reading. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Living and Practicing in Vow Sesshin Series: All 4 Parts

Episode Description: Sensei Robert continues his investigation of possibility as the nature of things, now in connection with "living by vow." If limited karmic activity -- acquiring and rejecting -- is a reaction to the world of vast possibility, then vow is how we transcend such a reaction. In place of seeing all appearances as assets or impediments to our pleasure, we ask how we can fulfill our vows with each one. We "free numberless creations" -- forms, beings -- by embracing them, meeting them just as they appear; not merely using them. For Teacher BIO, please visit Part 1. Please note: thematically and chronologically, this talk is both the conclusion of a two-part series -- "A Zen Buddhist Vision of Possibility" -- and the start (Part 1) of a four-part series, "Living and Practicing in Vow Sesshin."

Episode Description: Do-An Thomas says that life -- and you -- are possibility itself; that possibility is the stuff everything's made of. This creative potency comes precisely because we and every thing exist only in utter mutual dependence, because even the most static phenomenon is nothing but flow. We needn't therefore rouse ourselves to manufacture possibility -- it is ever arriving from beyond the horizon; we can just receive it. Do-An touches on his bout with cancer and on the Trikaya, or "Buddha Bodies," which he describes in fresh, immediate terms as our three bodies of possibility. Bio: Do-An Robert Thomas is a Zen Buddhist priest in the lineage of Rev. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, author of the modern spiritual classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, and founder of the first Soto Zen Buddhist monastery outside of Asia, Tassajara Zen Mountain Center. Robert’s dharma name, given to him when he was ordained as a priest in 2000, is Shi-Zan Do-An (Lion Mountain, Path of Kindness). He has been practicing Zen Buddhism since 1993, and in 2008 he received “Dharma Transmission” from his teacher, Zoketsu Norman Fischer. From 1994 to 2000 he trained intensively as a Zen monk at Tassajara, practicing intimately with many Zen teachers (including Tenshin Reb Anderson, Zenkei Blanche Hartman, Shisan Edward Brown, Sojun Mel Weitsman, Ryushin Paul Haller and others). He was ordained as a Zen priest in 2000 by Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and has enjoyed studying and practicing with a number of Tibetan and Theravadan Buddhist teachers. Today, Robert leads Zen retreats and workshops, and gives public lectures throughout the year. The expression of his Buddhist practice in his teachings has been focused on helping people from all walks of life to realize the practical benefits of Zen practice and meditation (zazen), and extend the Zen mind, with its qualities of openness, clarity, and flexibility, into every moment of their life. For many years Robert has been in a leadership role serving the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC) sangha, one of the largest Buddhist communities outside of Asia, and since 2005 he has been the President and CEO, overseeing the administration of all three SFZC practice centers (Tassajara, Green Gulch Farm, and City Center), as well as guiding its mission of bringing the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha to the world. Since 1993, Robert has traveled extensively in Asia, most often with his wife, Samantha Ostergaard, studying and practicing in the Theravadan and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, and at monasteries and practice centers in Thailand, India, Nepal, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. Robert’s university training is in fine art and filmmaking, and he has had a career as a film/video director, a magazine editor/creative director, and a small business owner. He continues to draw as often as he can and enjoys watching movies. He loves to hike and run regularly, and also takes great pleasure in cooking and reading. For Part 2 of this series, please visit Part 2.

Episode Description: Jimmy Baca delivers a rhapsody to the world-transfiguring power that comes upon us when we discover, and continually honor, voice -- voice in all our expressions, all our relations; forever shape-shifting, surprising, and brave. He says it must be impromptu and even uncomfortable if you want to make hardened killers weep in your arms. At 24:43 he screens the trailer for a movie about his life, which you can watch here. Bio: Jimmy Santiago Baca was born in 1952 in Santa Fe of Chicano and Apache descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was abandoned by his parents and at 13 ran away from the orphanage where his grandmother had placed him. He was convicted on drug charges in 1973 and spent five years in prison. There he learned to read and began writing poetry. His semiautobiographical novel in verse, Martin and Meditations on the South Valley (1987), received the 1988 Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1989. In addition to over a dozen books of poetry, he has published memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay, Bound by Honor (1993), which was made into a feature-length film directed by Taylor Hackford. Baca’s work is concerned with social justice and revolves around the marginalized and disenfranchised, treating themes of addiction, community, and the American Southwest barrios. In a Callaloo interview with John Keene, Baca claims, “I approach language as if it will contain who I am as a person”—a statement that reflects the poet’s interest in the transformative and generative power of language. Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979, 1991) was Baca’s first significant collection, one based on his imprisonment. In the Encyclopedia of American Literature, Catherine Hardy wrote that the poems in the volume “reveal an honest, passionate voice and powerful imagery full of the dark jewels of the American Southwest landscape (llanos, mesas, and chiles) and the chaotic urban landscape (nightclubs, rusty motors, and bricks) woven into a rich lyricism sprinkled with Spanish.” Baca’s other poetry titles include Healing Earthquakes (2001), C-Train & 13 Mexicans(2002), Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande (2004), and Spring Poems Along the Rio Grande (2007).  In addition to the American Book Award, Baca has received a Pushcart Prize and the Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature. His memoir, A Place to Stand (2001), garnered the International Prize. In 2006, Baca was awarded the Cornelius P. Turner Award, which honors GED graduates who have made “outstanding contributions” in areas such as education, justice, and social welfare. Baca has conducted writing workshops in prisons, libraries, and universities across the country for more than 30 years. In 2004 he launched Cedar Tree, a literary nonprofit designed to provide writing workshops, training, and outreach programs for at-risk youth, prisoners and ex-prisoners, and disadvantaged communities. Baca holds a BA in English and an honorary PhD in literature from the University of New Mexico.

Episode Description: Armed with thorough facts, close acquaintance and prisoners' own words, Upaya's Ray Olson paints a startling portrait of U.S. prisons, which are criminal themselves in so many respects. He also offers an exact list of remedies. He shares his chaplaincy strategies, his vital ways of framing Buddhist practice to illuminate its relevance to prisoners. He wonders, can everyone be rehabilitated -- in light of factors like mental illness, cultural poverty and unpreparedness, empathy-deficient brain structures, genes...? In closing he challenges and invites each of us to volunteer in prisons and so experience firsthand how prisoners are our neighbors, are us. Bio: Ray Olson is an internist by training, was a longtime Professor of Medicine at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. He has been a Zen student for over 30 years and received Jukai in 1989. He was ordained as a Novice Priest by Roshi Joan Halifax in 2009 and was made a Dharma Holder at Upaya Zen Center in 2010. Ray serves as coordinator of Upaya’s Prison Outreach Program, and in that capacity he corresponds with many inmates in prisons around the country, offering spiritual guidance to the incarcerated. He also makes weekly visits to inmates in the high security units of the local state penitentiary. Ray is long-married to Nancy; they have three grown children and four growing grandchildren.

Episode Description: Dr. Bauer-Wu probes the qualities and practices that might transform the experience of a life-limiting illness, one's own or that of a loved one. Foremost among these qualities are a fresh, narrative-relinquishing attention (particularly with physical pain), and love -- unscripted, undefended love, which flows from the egoless core of one's being and transcends roles. The indispensable practices for conveying such love are touch, silence, and speaking the formerly unspoken. Dr. Bauer-Wu urges that there is "little to lose, and so much to gain" -- in expanded, unburdened life together -- from having these difficult conversations. Bio : Dr. Susan Bauer-Wu, PhD, RN, FAAN, is a researcher, clinician, educator, and meditation practitioner and teacher whose work focuses on mind-body and integrative medicine, particularly mindfulness and compassion meditation practices in the context of cancer and other serious illnesses, for both patients and caregivers. Susan is the Kluge Professor of Contemplative End-of-Life Care at the University of Virginia School of Nursing (effective January 2013) and immediate past-president of the Society for Integrative Oncology. She has received numerous professional accolades and significant research funding for her work in this area. She teaches in the Upaya Being with Dying program and at resiliency retreats and training programs in the U.S. and abroad. Susan has authored dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters as well as a book for the lay public, entitled Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully with Serious and Life-Limiting Illness through Mindfulness, Compassion, and Connectedness (New Harbinger, 2011).

Episode Description: In this session for Upaya's chaplaincy training, Father John Dear speaks of the chaplaincy of nonviolence in both pastoral and prophetic roles -- including among the many Christians who don't see Jesus as a model of nonviolence. He underlines that compassionate listening is the singular healing service to wounded hearts, and tells tales from his devoted career: of being put on the spot to direct 600 chaplains at Ground Zero, of facilitating a deathbed change of heart in a rage-aholic wife-beater. He takes questions on the practicality of Gandhian resistance, details of contemporary Catholic rites and doctrines, and how hope differs from optimism. Bio : Father John Dear is an internationally known voice for peace and nonviolence. A Jesuit priest, pastor, peacemaker, organizer, lecturer, and retreat leader, he is the author/editor of 30 books, including his autobiography, “A Persistent Peace.” In 2008, John was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Episode Description: Musai Sydney Walter Roshi reads and discusses excerpts from his new book, "Off the Trail, On the Path," a collection of photos and descriptions from his wanderings and retreats in wild places. He tells of unexpected weather, growing old, and intimacies with the exuberant beauties of the land. See the slideshow below: Bio : Roshi Sydney Musai Walter began Zen Practice in 1970 with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center. After living at Tassajara Zen Monastery, then studying with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Musai became a student of Taizan Maezumi Roshi, at Zen Center of Los Angeles. He practiced with Maezumi Roshi until that teacher’s death in 1995, when he became a student of Jitsudo Ancheta Sensei, a dharma successor of Maezumi Roshi.In 1996, Jitsudo Sensei and Musai founded Hidden Mountain Zen Center in Albuquerque. In January of 1999, Musai received Dharma Transmission from Jitsudo Sensei. Since 2002, Musai has been studying the Big Mind process with Genpo Roshi, also a dharma successor of Maezumi Roshi. Musai has received denkai transmission (full priest empowerment) and authorization to teach the Big Mind process from Genpo Roshi. In 2008 Musai received inka, the final seal of approval, from Genpo Roshi. Musai is now retired from a career as a psychotherapist and family therapist. He will continue to teach at Prajna Zendo and spend more time wandering through the mountains and canyons of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado.

Episode Description: Dr. Cooper considers the affinities, and divergent aims, between the deconstruction undertaken by physicists and the deconstruction/de-reification of Dharma practice: for instance, relaxing into the unfabricated Nature of Mind isn't a physicist's aim. And yet, he says, there are deep parallels, and modern physics offers a valuable store of metaphors for meditative experience, subtle metaphors that improve in certain ways on colloquial "ocean and wave"-type imagery. Along the way he gives several quick and zesty physics lessons in such topics like the quantum vacuum and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Bio : Dr. Fred Cooper is a quantum field theorist who was a Ph.D. student of the Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Sheldon Glashow, one of the co-inventors of the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics. He has written over 200 published papers in various physics Journals and has co-authored a book, "Supersymmetry and Quantum Mechanics." He has been a student of Tai Situ Rinpoche since 1981. He has also received direct Mahamudra transmissions from the first KaluRinpoche and VV Mingyur Rinpoche. Fred has been teaching meditation at Karma and ShangpaKagyu centers affiliated with Kalu Rinpoche for over 20 years and he currently is the President of Kagyu Shenpen Kunchab Buddhist Center in Santa Fe, NM.

Episode Description: In this last dialogue, Bernie -- with a little help from Roshi Joan and Sensei Alan -- fields questions about whether the view that "everything is opinion" closes or opens dialogue; about the Greyston model; about the five Buddha families as a model for social entrepreneurship; about assassinating Hitler. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: The teachers complete the Q & A session. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: After a song led by Sensei Alan, the panel conducts a Q & A period to close out the day. Topics covered include liturgy, feminism, teacher-student relationships, clown noses, street retreats and the meaning of radical chaplaincy. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: Concluding the third session of the retreat, Roshi Bernie continues his dialogue with retreatants, answering questions about the stages of “bearing witness,” telling stories from the “Bearing Witness Retreats,” and discussing the practice of zazen. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts

Episode Description: Roshi Bernie describes the Zen Peacemakers Order and the approach of “Bearing Witness Retreats” with homelessness in New York and genocide at Auschwitz and in Rwanda. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: Engaged Buddhism Radical Chaplaincy Series: All 8 Parts