This is the 11th short video clip (2:50) 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 […]
Archive | Dharma & Teachings
Jōshū’s Oak Tree
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 […]
Koans and Relationship
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 […]

Some Thoughts about Practice
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 […]
Going Back To The Source: The Roots of Being Human {VIDEO Clip}
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 […]
Going Back To The Source: Humanist Enlightenment in The West {VIDEO Clip}
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 […]
Radical Acceptance
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 […]
Teachers
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. […]
Job
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 […]
Parents
… 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 […]