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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  • Far from Home: Not-knowing is most intimate, Part 2 of 3

    MCZCMay 16, 20166 min read

      Maybe this was what “relativity” meant, I thought to myself: there was no final, objectively correct perspective, just different ways of seeing things.   Apart from reading Prescott’s magisterial History of the Conquest of Peru, at that age I was looking at the Andes through a lens formed mostly by my schooling: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and maybe a little too much D. H. Lawrence. In the early 1980s Lawrence’s reputation was still riding high,...

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  • Far from Home: Not-knowing is most intimate, Part 1 of 3

    MCZCMay 13, 20164 min read

    We had overstepped ourselves, gone too high for the night: too high, too cold. One day when I was a young man 5,000 miles from home, on a gap year in South America, I hiked with a friend out of the town where I had been working, up into the Cordillera Vilcanota of Peru, heading for a 17,000-foot pass. We wanted to make as much progress as we could that day, but we were also conscious...

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  • Teisho: Paradox

    MCZCMay 12, 20161 min read

    “Pick up a speck of dust, and nation prospers, and the villagers knit their brows in anxiety. Put down a speck of dust, and the nation perishes, and everyone lives in peace.” Description: Henry talks about paradox, using a few koans from Fuketsu to show how Zen’s many paradoxical teachings can lead to peace, love and true intimacy.  He offers an illuminated vision of the Buddha’s middle way.  The middle way is traditionally seen as the middle between...

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  • Zen center marks 31st year with rededication, from the Albuquerque Journal

    MCZCMay 11, 20167 min read

    Originally published in the May 6 edition of the Albquerque Journal, written by Journal staff writer T.S Last. Photos from the article may be seen in the Journals' Photo Gallery on their website. It represented an awakening – a re-awakening in this context – for Santa Fe’s Mountain Cloud Zen Center, a Zen training and practice center nestled in the foothills just east of Santa Fe’s city limits. The gesture, as well as the knocks on a woodblock and...

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  • Message from Henry: Oil, Density and Zen

    MCZCMay 10, 20162 min read

    When you meditate: Sit down. Be still. Then ask yourself: what is it like to be still? Imagine a thick layer of crude oil over water. Caught in the level of the oil, we can struggle to understand the clear water below, but we never will. We can’t understand the water in terms of the world of oil. We have to taste the world of clear water first. Yet, if we try to do that, we just...

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  • Silence

    MCZCMay 9, 20161 min read

    There is no process to become silent. To disturb your mind, you need process. But to stay silent, there is no process. Stay in satsang, stay quiet, always have love with your own Self. You are not to win it by any attempt or effort. Simply stay quiet. If any thought rises, simply find out where it came from. ~Papaji Photo and creation by Rosa Bellino

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  • Interview by Sweeping Zen with David Loy, Part 6

    MCZCMay 6, 20168 min read

    It’s not enough to sit on our cushions and pursue our own individual development. That’s living out another version of the delusion of a separate self. Sweeping Zen: The next few questions are from some fans of Sweeping Zen on Facebook. One person asks, “How do we make Buddhism work in our contemporary lives without diluting its history and customary forms of practice?” David Loy: We’ve already touched on this. One issue today, which we did not...

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  • Teisho: Henry Shukman: Fuketsu’s Iron Ox

    MCZCMay 5, 20161 min read

    Description: Henry explores the challenging koan, Case  29 from the Book of Equanimity, Fuketsu’s Iron Ox, unravelling the matter of the “iron ox” and the “heart seal.” Are these metaphors? Listen to find out what they refer to.  We learn that our true nature resembles the iron ox, the absolute stillness through which all activity runs. Henry interjects some systems theory and an analogy about the Copernican revolution which takes us back to the core root...

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  • Message from Henry: The Executioner

    MCZCMay 3, 20162 min read

    ... you’re lucky enough to have a teacher or guide, a kind of executioner, who can kindly fan the flames for you.. The self-declared “awakened masters” without masters of their own, but with TV channels, mega retreats, massive media armies behind them – the loneliness they speak from, trapped in their own little boxes of self-ascribed “enlightenment,” kind of making it up as they go along: it’s so sad. No wonder some of them end up...

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  • Interview by Sweeping Zen with David Loy, Part 5

    MCZCMay 2, 20164 min read

    ...from a Zen perspective, at least, the most important rebirth is the one that happens every moment. Sweeping Zen: I think what we’re seeing today is a struggle between fundamentalism and the ability to see the metaphor, you know? David Loy: That reminds me of something Joseph Campbell wrote: “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all....

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  • Interview by Sweeping Zen with David Loy, Part 4

    MCZCApril 29, 20167 min read

    ...karma is not something the self has but what the sense of self is. Sweeping Zen: In Sanskrit, karma literally means “action” while vipaka is the karmic result of that action. Even thoughts are said to produce karma, because they lead to actions. You have argued that this simple conception of karma as cause and effect leads to the tendency in many Buddhist traditions to view a person’s situation (usually negative) as the result of something...

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  • Teisho by Ruben Habito Roshi: “My Last Teisho”

    MCZCApril 28, 20162 min read

    Description: In this powerful and compelling talk, Ruben Habito Roshi imagines that he is giving his last teisho, and encourages us to appreciate every moment as our very first and very last moment. He gives us the "ABC of Zen" --  first, Awareness; then discovery of our universal Belonging, along with all things; and finally our re-orientation toward Compassion, and Compassionate action in the world, on behalf of our fellow beings. A superb summary of the...

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  • Message from Henry: Koans

    MCZCApril 26, 20161 min read

    Koans are not riddles. They are not talking points for discussion. They are not devices to be used for psychodrama. Nor are they checklists to be knocked off in some deluded idea of progress.... They are opportunities to change the way we experience our very lives. They grant us the chance to change our experience from something shallow, two-dimensional, paper-dry, to something of limitless depth and unbounded dimension, and infinite potential. They ask only one thing...

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  • Interview by Sweeping Zen with David Loy, Part 3

    MCZCApril 25, 20163 min read

    The way that God is usually understood – an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving heavenly Father who tells us how to live – doesn’t really work anymore. Sweeping Zen: For many Westerners both Buddhism and psychology are perceived as elitist — for intellectuals. From the average Joe perspective I think that, for Buddhism to truly have an impact, it may sometimes need to be viewed through the scope of peoples’ own religious tradition. Some Buddhist tenets may need...

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