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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  • Jōshū’s Oak Tree

    MCZCJanuary 4, 20155 min read

    A monk asked Jōshū in all earnestness, "What is the meaning of the patriarch's coming from the West?" Jōshū said, "The oak tree in the garden." There are several things Jōshū could mean when he responds to the monk’s question—“Why did Bodhidharma come from India?”—by saying, “The oak tree there in the garden.” What we think he means will depend on what we have “seen” for ourselves of the Buddha-dharma. First, we might think he means: look...

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  • Koans and Relationship

    MCZCJanuary 2, 20153 min read

    This is the lifeblood of Zen: the transmission, the intimacy of a bare-bones meeting between two people, between reality itself and reality itself.  Occasionally I’ve heard people ask if it’s valuable to read a book of koans. Some koans are beautiful; some seem to have humorous moments; some contain vivid dramas and narratives. Wouldn’t they make good reading by themselves? All koans can stir up a niggling sense of doubt. Have I missed something here? This surely...

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  • Some Thoughts about Practice

    MCZCDecember 31, 20143 min read

    If we want to sum up the precepts into one handy “take-home,” it might be: practice kindness. Or just: kindness. Or simply: be kind. Zazen gives us a chance each day to reset our perspective. We can reboot in a universal perspective of patience and acceptance, one which recognizes and is at peace with the fact that this body will one day give out and stop existing in its present form. Zazen encourages us neither to...

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  • Message from Henry: Random Thoughts

    MCZCDecember 30, 20144 min read

    Causes and conditions are all quietly and peacefully obeying the natural law of Dharma, without agency and without fretting, resistance or objection.  Peace: this practice is only in part about managing to find ways to calm ourselves. Rather, we let go of ourselves, we see that we ourselves are a fiction, a fabrication, and when we see that, we see that our worries, concerns and aspirations are also fictions. As Julian of Norwich said: “All shall be...

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  • Going Back To The Source: The Roots of Being Human {VIDEO Clip}

    MCZCDecember 29, 20144 min read

    This is the 10th short video clip (3:43) from the conversation between Stephen Batchelor and Henry Shukman, on June 4, 2014, at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico on “Going Back to the Source.”  The entire talk's video (1:03:15) can also be viewed on our YouTube channel. Their dialogue covers : Eastern and Western thought, the great doubt, dismantling of knowing, ancient greeks and buddhism, zen and classical philosophy, seeing with clarity, humanist enlightenment in the west, roots of...

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  • Going Back To The Source: Humanist Enlightenment in The West {VIDEO Clip}

    MCZCDecember 27, 20147 min read

    This is the 9th short video clip (8:44) from the conversation between Stephen Batchelor and Henry Shukman, on June 4, 2014, at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico on “Going Back to the Source.”  The entire talk's video (1:03:15) can also be viewed on our YouTube channel. Their dialogue covers : Eastern and Western thought, the great doubt, dismantling of knowing, ancient greeks and buddhism, zen and classical philosophy, seeing with clarity, humanist enlightenment in the west, roots of...

    Watch the video
  • Radical Acceptance

    MCZCDecember 25, 20143 min read

      Slowly we are being pulled into the center and core of our being. We are gently coming to know our “kokoro” – our heart-mind, our core – ever more intimately. In Zen, the slower we go the sooner we get there. The “goal” is not out there. Maybe it’s better to think of ourselves like a toy duck floating in a bath tub. We keep bobbing against the sides. We think we have to know where we are...

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  • Teachers

    MCZCDecember 23, 20143 min read

    The tree is the self. The day it falls is the day we let ourselves go, and drop into a vast truth that has been with us all along yet which we didn’t see.. I’m sure there are people out there who don’t need a teacher but I’m so happy I’m not one of them. One of the many errors (as I now see it) that I made for years was imagining that “enlightenment” was some...

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  • Job

    MCZCDecember 21, 20142 min read

    Is it really possible to resolve our human life in spite of all the losses we face? In a sense, the Bible story of Job is a story of awakening. After repeated assaults on all the outward conditions of Job’s life—his family, his friends, his flocks—after losing everything he valued, he finally discovers there is one thing he cannot lose: God. It represents a movement from reliance on outward things to reliance on something inward—or, as Zen...

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  • Parents

    MCZCDecember 19, 20143 min read

    ... it became clear how very much I owed my birth parents. I was grateful to them in a way I never had been before.... They had given me the greatest opportunity of all, a human life. Yasutani Roshi said this about his mother’s life story: My mother’s family fell more and more into poverty until they could hardly survive. It got to the point my grandmother was forced to give up her child, my mother, leaving...

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  • Message from Henry: A Recent Move

    MCZCDecember 17, 20144 min read

    “The clarification of life and death—this is Buddhism’s most important concern.” -- Dogen Zen is not just a matter of sitting ourselves down on the “seat of enlightenment” ...and hoping for the best. The following message was recently sent round a Sanbo Zen sangha by its founding teacher (who happens to be over 90) about one of the members who had recently died: Thank you for the notice of [so and so’s] most recent move. Good for her!...

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  • Going Back To The Source: Ancient Greeks and Buddhism {VIDEO Clip}

    MCZCDecember 17, 20143 min read

    Stephen Batchelor returns to Mountain Cloud on Thursday April 2, 2-4pm for a conversation on early Buddhism, the Zen tradition and ancient Greek Philosophy with Mountain Cloud guiding teacher Henry Shukman--continuing the exploration of contact and congruence between the ancient East and West. Last year, Stephen and Henry sat down for an engaging conversation, on June 4th, at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.on "Going Back to the Source." ... below is an earlier post...

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  • Dharma Adaptation

    MCZCDecember 15, 20142 min read

    We are very attached to our selves and their desires and loves and fears. Yes, we have to find ways for Dharma practice to adapt to western culture... But the far greater project is our own adapting to the Dharma. Otherwise, why bother? Some fruits of meditation are easier to accept than others. Who wouldn’t want to be more present, appreciative or kind, for example? But actually, being present is not always so easy. At times it may...

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  • Art and Dharma

    MCZCDecember 13, 20142 min read

      Something wants to be born... Some masters speak of the spiritual quest as a pregnancy. We may think we’re trying to resolve things for ourselves, find out who we really are, what this life is, but those are only symptoms. The pregnancy is not a metaphor. Something wants to be born. Writers and artists mimic the process. They get pregnant and give birth to a work. Perhaps they short-circuit a greater birth trying to happen, which could...

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