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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  • Message from Henry: Emptiness

    MCZCNovember 7, 20142 min read

    All the teachings that have come down to us arise from this single fact, of emptiness...The fact, the reality, is single because it includes and encompasses all phenomena, all experience. In fact we might say the only experience it doesn’t include is itself. The fundamental Zen teaching is of emptiness. All the teachings that have come down to us arise from this single fact, of emptiness. Emptiness is a hopeless word though. It’s just a label. Buddha-nature,...

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  • What Cannot Be Conveyed: Interview by Joanna Harcourt-Smith (FuturePrimitive)

    MCZCNovember 3, 20141 min read

    Henry participates in an engaging conversation with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, of FuturePrimitive about: an inexplicable “moment of epiphany,” a long search, a relationship system, clarifying who we really are, a path of not-knowing, trying to convey what cannot be conveyed, “things just happen,” archetypal dreamwork, psychology with a spiritual dimension, and two poems. Please click here to listen. The FuturePrimitive is a podcast website, where Joanna hosts conversations with people who are participating in the shift that is occurring at this moment...

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  • Going Back To The Source: Dismantling of Knowing {VIDEO Clip}

    MCZCOctober 31, 20142 min read

    This is the 2nd short video clip (3:53) 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.”  UPDATE Nov 6, 2014: The full video (1:03:15) can 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...

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  • Our New YouTube Channel {VIDEO Clip}

    MCZCOctober 28, 20142 min read

    Mountain Cloud Zen Center now has a YouTube Channel. Our 1st video is a short clip (2:12) 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.” UPDATE Nov 6, 2014: The full video (1:03:15) can be viewed on our YouTube channel. Their dialogue covers : Eastern and Western thought, the great doubt, dismantling of knowing, ancient greeks and buddhism,...

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  • Message from Henry: Two Sides

    MCZCOctober 24, 20144 min read

    ...there seem to be two sides to Zen. One is the diligent practice. We alone are responsible for showing up time and again...Then there's the other side... the "matter of extraordinary wonder," the reality we are all part of, the great fact, the great vehicle, the one body, the "vast and void," as Bodhidharma called it, the "all-encompassing hole," as Keizan Zenji called it... I used to play the trombone. As a child it was all...

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  • Podcast: Hyakujo and the Wild Duck

    MCZCOctober 20, 20141 min read

    Episode Description: This famous koan from the Blue Cliff Record explores Master Hyakujo’s own journey to awakening under the decisive guidance of his master Baso. It also investigates the true meaning of awakening and its effects in our life. This talk was given by our resident teacher, Henry Shukman, on October 17, 2013.

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  • Message from Henry: Empty Sky

    MCZCOctober 18, 20142 min read

    This week, another poem, this time by the British poet A.E.Housman, who was a brilliant “redactor”– meaning the day scholarly art of creating authoritative annotated editions of classical texts. In spite of career setbacks he became an eminent professor of classics at University College London, and also Cambridge, but what made him famous was a book of poems that seemed to blow through him out of nowhere in the mid 1890s. He didn’t consider himself...

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  • Message from Henry: Some Early Ancestors

    MCZCOctober 10, 20143 min read

    What if Zen is a path without progress, where progress is just another illusion? ...A path that’s complete and fulfilled before we even take a step. The journey of a lifetime begins with a single step, after all… but perhaps it also ends with that same single step. A quick look at Zen’s early ancestors in China can be a bit surprising…. … a homeless wanderer far from his homeland, with wounded eyes and a body so...

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  • Message from Henry: Friends

    MCZCOctober 8, 20143 min read

    Sometimes I wonder if the greatest value of our Dharma practice is what it does to our ability to relate to one another. Could it be that all our practice is, in the end, a pretext for the truly great event: being together without our ordinary social minds? The reason we sit in silence without any of the customary social eye contact and greetings is overtly to help each of us focus on our practice. But...

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  • Going Back to the Source: A conversation with Stephen Batchelor and Henry Shukman

    MCZCOctober 3, 20144 min read

    On June 4, 2014, Stephen Batchelor and Henry Shukman sat down for an engaging conversation at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico on "Going Back to the Source." 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 being human, Zen’s transitional phase, like mindedness, sharing an identity with everything...

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  • Random Thoughts on Practice

    MCZCSeptember 29, 20142 min read

    All is well at Mountain Cloud. Flowers are blooming intensely in the tail end of a long and wonderfully wet summer.  As the poet said: What would the world be, once bereftOf wet and wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.                                 (Gerard Manley Hopkins) Once again, some random thoughts on...

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  • Me

    MCZCSeptember 25, 20143 min read

    It turns out this “me” is a seed -- as Jesus said, it’s the “corn of wheat” that must fall to the ground and die. Zen always says: Die! Be killed! Why? Because this little agent of separation called “me” – this identity that creates itself and in doing so creates its own separation – this crumb of distinction and isolation, can be the source of all germinating and fructifying goodness, but only if it falls to...

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  • Angst

    MCZCSeptember 23, 20144 min read

    "... If we could just flip the angle of light, the trick of perspective, we would see exactly what we do not see, rather than what we do see..." What about the angst we modern humans are heir to, the “vague nameless dread” that comes with our moral and spiritual uncertainty, as Yamada Koun Roshi calls it? We live in an age where religious and moral certitudes have disintegrated. We no longer live within a web of...

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  • Podcast: Seppo’s Poisonous Snake

    MCZCSeptember 21, 20141 min read

    Episode Description: In this talk exploring Case 22 of the Blue Cliff Record, we examine the teachings of the great Tang-dynasty master Seppo, who had a long hard struggle in his own practice, after which he became a teacher of many great Zen masters, and whose legacy is still alive today. This talk was given by our resident teacher, Henry Shukman.

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