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.

  • The Art of Being Wrong: Part 4 of 4

    MCZCFebruary 6, 20154 min read

    ...a truth of spiritual life: that there are moments we come to when our thinking is suspended, and when an old knowing has been dropped and the attachment to a new knowing has not yet arisen.   This post is the final installment of the four part series, The Art of Being Wrong. Click here to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. One sees a comparable pattern in various types of psychotherapy. Cognitive therapy...

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  • Rohatsu Sesshin 2014 Day 3 of 4

    MCZCFebruary 5, 20151 min read

    The third talk of the sesshin focuses on "nothing to attain" and "allowing", and includes beautiful and relevant stories of Tolstoy's. Image Credit: Above image from Mountain Cloud Image Archives Featured Image Credit: Stones, Meditation by memyselfaneye, CC0 Public Domain, from pixabay.com

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  • Message from Henry: A Few Thoughts

    MCZCFebruary 4, 20152 min read

    The sudden clear recognition that we never existed the way we thought we did: true kensho. We are all falling into the loam of Mu, where our self can split open, die and bring forth the shoot of the original face of all things. *** Please just don’t forget: it’s for real. The purpose of this training is to help us first to have a glimpse of reality, and then slowly painstakingly to help us shift...

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  • The Art of Being Wrong: Part 3 of 4

    MCZCFebruary 3, 20155 min read

    ...as Nansen told Joshu, we are more likely to stumble upon the Way when we cease our vaunting efforts to “attain” it. Rather, when we succumb with grace to the fact that we are, basically, hopeless cases, we have an extraordinary opportunity to discover in what sense we are not hopeless. This post is Part 3 of The Art of Being Wrong. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2. Chekhov said that the fiction...

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  • The Art of Being Wrong: Part 2 of 4

    MCZCFebruary 1, 20156 min read

    This is where a koan’s capacity for liberation lies—not in the discovery of some new knowledge but in its power to help us give up our familiar template of knowing. This post is a continuation of The Art of Being Wrong Part 1. Peripeteia as defined by Aristotle is a literary device. But it seems to share a deep resonance with the way our actual lives unfold. Our lives are stories too, after all. Peripeteia...

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  • The Art of Being Wrong: Part 1 of 4

    MCZCJanuary 30, 20156 min read

    Nearly always, in great literature, there is some kind of turning point in a narrative arc which is also a turning back—something like Dogen’s “backward step that shines the light inward”—wherein a character is granted an opportunity to understand himself in a different or better way, and it’s that that makes all the difference. There’s a scene in the fine and dark TV series Breaking Bad in which a villainous drug dealer, half-dead and half-blinded...

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  • Rohatsu Sesshin 2014, Day 2 of 4

    MCZCJanuary 29, 20151 min read

    In day two, Henry continues the exploration of "Continuous Practice," and brings in a discussion of the process of sesshin, as well as the book "The Authentic Gate of Zen" by Yamada Koun Roshi, and stages/no stages in practice, among other things. Image Credit: Above image from Mountain Cloud Image Archives Featured Image Credit: Stones, Meditation by memyselfaneye, CC0 Public Domain, from pixabay.com

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  • Message from Henry: Generous Universe

    MCZCJanuary 28, 20154 min read

    There’s an infinite generosity arising all the time, every moment – in other words, right now – freely giving itself. We’re so used to it and so close to it that it is hard to notice it for what it is. We recently looked at the 8th precept in the Sunday morning discussion group: don’t be stingy. Or more formally: “Don’t begrudge the Dharma treasure.” That is, don’t hoard or keep for oneself either Dharma...

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  • A Matter of Misdirection: Part 3 of 3

    MCZCJanuary 25, 20159 min read

    For while original enlightenment is without limits, its expression is always particular. We don’t live life in general; we live life in particular ways, and it is in its particulars that life is invested with wisdom and meaning. This is the final installment of A Matter of Misdirection. Click to Read Part 1 and Part 2.   The Lotus Sutra is probably the preeminent text in East Asian Buddhism, and it is often referred to as the...

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  • A Matter of Misdirection: Part 2 of 3

    MCZCJanuary 23, 20158 min read

    It seems paradoxical, and it is: by becoming absorbed in the foreground, we allow the background gently (and sometimes suddenly) to come to life. This post is a continuation of A Matter of Misdirection: Part 1 In his first teaching, the Buddha explicitly taught that we exist in a state of suffering and that we can be liberated from it. There’s a stick, and there’s a carrot. There’s a path from A to B, from...

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  • Rohatsu Sesshin 2014, Day 1 of 4

    MCZCJanuary 22, 20151 min read

    In this first teisho of the sesshin, Henry introduces Dogen's fascicle on Continuous Practice, and starts to explore what Dogen meant by that term.  The talk includes poetry by Yeats, explores the awakening of Shakyamuni Buddha, and spends time with the koan Mu, among other things. Image Credit: Above image from Mountain Cloud Image Archives Featured Image Credit: Stones, Meditation by memyselfaneye, CC0 Public Domain, from pixabay.com

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  • A Matter of Misdirection: Part 1 of 3

    MCZCJanuary 21, 20156 min read

    Misdirection is akin to a principle of growth and development, and it’s no accident that its operations can be detected within the structures of many wisdom traditions. How we learn by looking in the wrong place In “Indian Camp,” the first story in Hemingway’s first book, In Our Time, a boy and his father paddle out on a lake to an island where a pregnant Native American woman is having a hard labor. The boy...

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  • Dangerous Formulae

    MCZCJanuary 16, 20153 min read

      When treasures of the human heart become explicit, there is a greater risk of their becoming doctrinal, then formulaic, then ritualistic and ceremonial, and ultimately banal, mere forms of words and no longer living treasures at all. When Jesus talked about dying and being reborn in the kingdom of heaven, for example, it seems likely he was referring to an actual experience he knew himself, which caused a fundamental shift in his entire experience....

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  • Message from Henry: Self and Non-Self Based Practice

    MCZCJanuary 14, 20154 min read

    The teachings are nothing but guidance, a set of instructions perhaps, for something we have to do ourselves. Which is to settle down and drop into the reality of who we are. The reason the old masters often railed against students who went here and there picking up fag-ends of teachings, trying to get this and that piece of teaching, “as if trying to take some from a dog’s mouth,” as one old worthy put...

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