Teachings

  • Message from Valerie: An Invitation to Serve

    Valerie ForstmanJanuary 25, 20232 min read

    Mountain Cloud sangha members are currently coming together once each month to prepare and serve a delicious meal at the Interfaith Shelter, known as Pete’s Place, here in Santa Fe. For members interested in further engagement with vulnerable segments of our community, we have an opportunity to serve with fellow practitioners in Upaya’s Street Ministry project.  Upaya’s Street Ministry focuses on supporting member’s of Santa Fe’s community who are experiencing homelessness. Volunteers in the Street Ministry not only...

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  • Blue Cliff Record 62, Unmon’s Single Treasure

    MCZCApril 9, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: As the winter solstice descends, Henry Shukman explores Unmon’s Single Treasure, Case 62 of the Blue Cliff Record. This puzzling koan helps us turn our habitual views upside down. Roshi Henry describes the great invitation of Zen which is to abandon our cherished opinions and find the single jewel that makes the “one true fact” apparent. Henry talks about Christmas, the death penalty and his encounter with a Navy Seal in this elucidation...

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  • Message from Henry: Zen Musings

    MCZCApril 8, 20153 min read

    It’s part of Zen’s great and simple beauty that it is inherently ready to self-destruct. It’s a self-destructing system. It’s part of Zen’s great and simple beauty that it is inherently ready to self-destruct. It’s a self-destructing system. It must be. The heart of its liberation requires it – a nothing at all from which Zen itself can’t be exempt.  Yet it’s so beautiful. Primo Levi, the Nobel prize-winning author, an industrial chemist by trade, said that...

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  • The Unfamiliar Familiar: Part 4 of 6

    MCZCApril 7, 20155 min read

    The scriptures do not merely speak about the deconstruction of preconception; they enact it. Click to read The Unfamiliar Familiar Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In the early Buddhist texts, defamiliarization is established in the content of what is said; in the later Mahayana teachings of the early first millennium C.E., it tends to occupy a central place not just in the content but in the very form of the texts. The scriptures do not merely...

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  • The Unfamiliar Familiar: Part 3 of 6

    MCZCApril 5, 20154 min read

    This kind of disbanding of an assumption—whether of something as fundamental as our sense of self, or merely of a preconception about a classical poet—can bring about a radical new openness. Click to read The Unfamiliar Familiar Part 1 and Part 2. In John Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the poet dramatizes a sudden expansion of view. Keats had never learned Greek and did not like Pope’s versions of the classics, but one...

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  • Sanbo (Three Treasures) Zen: Part 3 of 3

    MCZCApril 3, 20157 min read

    Joan Rieck presented this piece at an international conference held at Tiantong Monastery in China in the Fall of 2014 - the very temple where Dogen had his great enlightenment experience of “body and mind falling away.”  Click to Read Sanbo Zen: Part 1 and Part 2 Yasutani Roshi’s organization Sanbō Kyōdan was legally recognized as an independent Zen Buddhist religious organization on January 8th 1954. As had been the case under Harada Roshi, there were lay...

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  • Blue Cliff Record 75, Ukyu’s Blind Stick

    MCZCApril 2, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: Continuing with the Blue Cliff Record, this talk explores Case 75, Ukyu’s Blind Stick. Find out what happens when Ukyu wields his stick. Roshi Henry discusses the background of this intriguing koan and ponders the nature of emptiness. We learn about the five types of Zen blindness and that all beings are blessed because there is no separation. Image Credit: IMG_4768 via photopin CC BY-SA 2.0 Featured Image Credit: Zen-Mind, by Hartwig HKD, CC BY-ND 2.0....

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  • Message from Henry: Mount Sumeru

    MCZCApril 1, 20154 min read

    ...maybe we are simply learning to be more like the land in our sitting – to sit still as the rocks, yet humming with intrinsic awareness. I used to think, with many koans: there’s just not enough to go on. How are we supposed to know what to make of it when it’s so spare? Surely we need to add a lot to it, to read things into it. In fact I used to wonder if...

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  • Sanbo (Three Treasures) Zen: Part 2 of 3

    MCZCMarch 30, 20155 min read

    Joan Rieck presented this piece at an international conference held at Tiantong Monastery in China in the Fall of 2014 - the very temple where Dogen had his great enlightenment experience of “body and mind falling away.”  Click to Read Sanbo Zen: Part 1. Yasutani Haku’un (1885-1973) is the official founder of Sanbō Zen, an independent Zen line formerly known as Sanbō Kyōdan and often referred to as the “Harada-Yasutani School” because it is based on...

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  • Sanbo (Three Treasures) Zen: Part 1 of 3

    MCZCMarch 28, 20156 min read

      Joan Rieck Roshi presented this piece at an international conference held at Tiantong Monastery in China in the Fall of 2014 - the very temple where Dogen had his great enlightenment experience of “body and mind falling away.” Sanbō Zen is an independent lay line of Zen Buddhism that blends elements of both the Caodong (Soto) and Linji (Rinzai) traditions in its teaching and practice. Its purpose is stated on its website (sanbō-zen.org) by the second...

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  • Hyakujo’s “Turning Word” from The Book of Equanimity

    MCZCMarch 26, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: Roshi Henry presents a case from the Book of Equanimity in which Master Hyakujo’s "turning word" about the law of causation releases an old man into authentic freedom. Hear a magical story about how a man receives healing, love and timeless understanding from a gentle whale. Using personal disclosure and koan explication, Henry shows us how a kensho experience can lead to a dualistic split between "awakening" and "delusion," which ongoing koan study...

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  • Message from Henry: Coke Zero

    MCZCMarch 25, 20155 min read

    Only through the gateless gate of absolute zero does our real life spring forth most wonderfully: "the iron trees come into bloom." COKE ZERO: TRADITION AND INNOVATION Sometimes people talk about “traditional” versus “innovative” approaches to practice. I want to suggest that both these terms might be missing one point. The true fact, the fundamental reality of Zen is enshrined in the core of the Heart Sutra. Commonly translated as “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” this...

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  • The Unfamiliar Familiar: Part 2 of 6

    MCZCMarch 23, 20154 min read

    The early Buddhist scriptures tend to be didactic and discursive, often familiar to us moderns in their reason and rationality. Yet even here defamiliarization is at work, not so much in the style as in the content. Click to read The Unfamiliar Familiar Part 1 The world is dynamic and changing; therein lies its freshness. But our ideas about it tend to grow static and calcified, even our ideas about the most important things: who we are,...

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  • The Unfamiliar Familiar: Part 1 of 6

    MCZCMarch 21, 20154 min read

    Learning to see the world anew "A fresh look and a fresh listen,” said Robert Frost of a good poem. “Read it a hundred times: it will for ever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance.” A poem may not show us anything new, but what we see, we see afresh, and what we hear, we hear anew. Frost was talking about the poem itself: what it presents, and the way it does it,...

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  • Blue Cliff Record 70, 71, & 72, How does one Speak with Lips and Throat Closed?

    MCZCMarch 19, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: This talk combines three related Blue Cliff Record cases 70, 71, and 72. We meet Hyakujo, Isan, Goho and Ungan, who grapple with the nature of speech and ultimate understanding. Roshi Henry Shukman draws on his extensive literary background to relate koan structure with narrative storytelling, which includes references to character transformation in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a discussion of epic poetry’s roots in the shamanic journey. This far-reaching and inspiring teisho is...

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