Teachings

You can find all of our weekly Dharma talks for free right here on this page, as well as on our YouTube channel and podcast. Live talks take place every Thursday from 5:30–7:00pm MT, both in-person and on Zoom (sit.mountaincloud.org — password: mountain22). Members receive access to some special archival materials.

  • Message from Henry: Great Matter

    MCZCJune 30, 20152 min read

    We are all on the sesshin called life and death whether we are aware of it or not, and which we share with all beings, great and small. I used to hear about the “great matter” in Zen and tend to feel a bit afraid: oh no, not another thing I’m not attending to… and what is it anyway, this ominous “matter”? On the one hand, of course, the “great matter” is simply life and...

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  • Listening to the Voices of the Great Wide Earth, Part 1 of 3

    MCZCJune 29, 20157 min read

    “I came to realize clearly that the mind is not other than mountains, rivers, the great wide earth, sun, moon, stars”.  -Dogen This is a passage from thirteenth century Zen Master Dōgen that triggered the awakening experience of my teacher, Koun Yamada. “I came to realize clearly that mind is no other than mountains, rivers, the great wide earth and everything in it” “Mind” here refers to no other than the True Self, my true...

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  • Tree of Wisdom

    MCZCJune 27, 20152 min read

    Oak and maple, palm and pine—trees are our closest neighbors and most patient teachers... on the common roots of people and trees. There is a cabin in the remote mountains of northern New Mexico that stands on the side of a steep, wooded ravine. It is hidden deep among the huge ponderosa pines that thrive in the high air. Near the cabin, one lone dead pine soars a hundred feet into the sky. It has...

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  • Case 1 Book of Equanimity, The World Honored One Ascends the Rostrum

    MCZCJune 25, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: This teisho begins Henry’s journey through the Book of Equanimity. Case 1 shows the importance of just sitting, being still and quiet. Henry discusses Shakyamuni Buddha’s first teachings. He explores the teaching on dukkha (intrinsic dissatisfaction) and asks: Is there something in the core of ourselves that is intrinsically dissatisfied and dissatisfying? Henry then turns to Shakyamuni’s second teaching, on anatta—not self -- and provides some background introduction to the Book of Equanimity which...

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  • Message from Henry: Touching the Heart

    MCZCJune 24, 20154 min read

    In sesshin we are like rows of seeds planted in the loam of the teaching, partially shaded from the fiercest sun by the leaves of Buddha’s original tree, and watered by the presence of the community of fellow-sitters…  SESSHIN – TOUCHING THE HEART As practitioners we are in effect servants, or agents, of happiness. But it’s a fundamental, non-conditional kind of happiness we are talking about. So its path is not always easy. It will...

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  • About a Poem: The Monkey is Reaching

    MCZCJune 22, 20153 min read

    About a Poem: Henry Shukman on Hakuin Ekaku’s "The Monkey is Reaching"     The monkey is reachin For the moon in the water. Until death overtakes him He’ll never give up. If he’d let go the branch and Disappear in the deep pool The whole world would shine With dazzling pureness.       This seems to me a very rich poem. It’s clearly personal as well as general—I doubt anyone could write this...

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  • More on Zen and the Art

    MCZCJune 20, 20154 min read

    To promote oneself is, apparently, a necessary part of being an artist. But how are we to marry this with being a Buddhist, one who has taken the Bodhisattva Vow to help all beings before oneself?   I thought I knew what I was letting myself in for when I blithely dived into an essay on the phrase Zen and the Art.  I’d been a writer since my teens, a Zen practitioner for almost as long....

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  • Shin-Jin-Mei (Verses on the Faith-Mind) by Sosan, Part 3 of 3

    MCZCJune 18, 20151 min read

    Episode Description: Henry continues to explicate Sosan’s Shin-Jin Mei and incorporates the Three Treasures—Buddha, Dharma and Sangha--into the meaning of the poem. The Shin-Jin-Mei is an example of Dharma, a teaching or guidance, which helps us find our core, the heart/mind of ourselves (Buddha) and our universe (Sangha). Henry also discusses another meaning of Dharma, as "natural law," intangible but vividly experienceable, always with us, and in us, right now. The other 2 parts of this...

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  • Message from Henry: Empty Mirror

    MCZCJune 16, 20153 min read

    An empty mirror; the giver of all; no mirror; a fire without fuel: the Dharma.  It’s like we have stitched and threaded such a thick web around and through our minds that it’s hard for reality to break in. But it keeps trying. And sooner or later a strand snaps, and a glimmer of light breaks in, and another, and another, and gradually the cat’s cradle of wires and threads starts to lose its integrity...

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  • Zen and the Art: Part 4 of 4

    MCZCJune 15, 20154 min read

    ...the secret truth is that art is useless... Its “purpose” is to delight with its purposelessness, to demonstrate that in our lives of “getting and spending” there must be one thing without utilitarian value. Click to read Zen and the Art, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In his book What Good Are the Arts? the British cultural critic John Carey argues that art is whatever someone defines as art. Yet even if we...

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  • Zen and the Art: Part 3 of 4

    MCZCJune 13, 20156 min read

    Perhaps there is a parallel between the artist wrestling with his medium, bending it to the shape he seeks, and a dharma practitioner wrestling with the equally intractable medium of the “self,” which she strives to see for what it is. Click to read Zen and the Art, Part 1 and Part 2. The Trappist monk and accomplished writer and poet Thomas Merton wrote: “Today the artist has inherited the combined functions of hermit, pilgrim,...

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  • Life is worth living … full flow! {VIDEO}

    MCZCJune 11, 20151 min read

    "...life, ...  for all it's bruises and false starts, it's blind alleys and reversals, it's failures, ... is worth living ... full flow ..." This YouTube video, below, is being posted in lieu of this week's podcast episode. Regular weekly (every Thursday) publishing of podcast episodes will recommence with the next episode on Jun 18th. Bill Broyles, who is not a meditator but a friend of Henry’s and supporter of Mountain Cloud, grew up in a refinery town...

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  • Message from Henry: Reflections on the Ox

    MCZCJune 9, 20154 min read

    And the true ox (in Zen’s famous sequence of the ten ox-herding pictures), if there is one, is no ox at all.  REFLECTIONS ON THE OX Last week in the zendo I was saying that koans are an affront to our humanity. Maybe I should have been clearer: they are only an affront to our imagined or assumed idea of what it means to be human. To our real humanity they are a blessed expression...

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  • Zen and the Art: Part 2 of 4

    MCZCJune 8, 20156 min read

        According to the Buddhist scholar Robert Sharf, the relationship between Zen and art is neither simple nor obvious. Indeed, it is a matter that we in the West have largely gotten wrong...         Click to read Zen and The Art Part 1 The connection between certain Chinese arts and Chan has been overstated, Sharf told me. It was in important ways tangential. In feudal society, Buddhist monasteries were cultural centers,...

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