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: Concentration

    MCZCMay 24, 20163 min read

    In truth, nothing needs to change. All things are equally the Dharma unfolding At some point the resistance, the need to control the experience we have in meditation, just evaporates. It’s gone. Instead, rather than being outside it and trying to manipulate it, we find ourselves right in our experience, When we do, it feels good. A moment ago we may have been frustrated with a recurring need to sneeze, or a wandering mind, or...

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  • Five Blossoms

    MCZCMay 23, 20161 min read

      I originally came to China to transmit the teaching and save deluded beings. One flower opens five petals, and the fruit ripens itself. - Bodhidharma, according to Huineng       If evil flowers bloom in the mind-ground, Five blossoms flower from the stem. Together they will create the karma of ignorance; Now the mind-ground is blown by the winds of karma. If correct flowers bloom in the mind-ground, Five blossoms flower from the...

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

    MCZCMay 20, 20165 min read

    ...giving up one’s own certainties can open up a door toward a deeper intimacy with things, especially with people. For some years after, I was fortunate enough to work as a travel writer, penning narratives about unfamiliar places, aspiring to be a junior emulator of the likes of Pico Iyer and Bruce Chatwin. I did it in part because I was seeking the same liberation from my own perspective that I’d tasted in the Andes....

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  • Teisho: Love and the Three Treasures

    MCZCMay 19, 20161 min read

    “Love is the opposite of separation.” Description: In this short Valentines Day, Sunday morning talk, Henry explores love: our love for the practice and the abiding love practice has for us. In this latter love, we are gently led to intrinsic, non-separate true nature. Henry shows how the nature of love is embedded in the three treasures:  “Buddha discovered no separation. Dharma points to no separation. Sangha manifests no separation.” Post Image Credit: Flora by AliceKeyStudio,...

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  • Message from Henry: Sit. See. Serve.

    MCZCMay 17, 20162 min read

    ...we are not the center of everything...earth is but one dot in an infinite cosmos. It's a comparable shift to that for Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy. We watch the beauty of stars fading in the dawn sky, of a moon rising over the mountains, and think: what a show, put on for us, the inhabitants of this planet. But then we find... Oh no, it's not a show for us, we are not the center...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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