**online only**: Dharma Talk: “What does Dogen mean by shikantaza or ‘just sitting’?” with Nancy Mujo Baker Roshi
***Now online only***
Thursday, August 13th | 5:30–7:00 PM
Meditation begins at 5:30 pm MT, followed by the Dharma Talk (teisho) at 6:00 pm MT.
You are invited to join us for an evening with Nancy Mujo Baker Roshi at Mountain Cloud Zen Center’s zendo, where she will be leading the Dharma Talk titled, “What does Dogen mean by shikantaza or ‘just sitting’?”
‘Just sitting’ can sound easy, when, in fact, it isn’t. My teacher used to say it was the most difficult kind of meditation. What makes it difficult? How does it compare with koan practice? In his Fukanzazengi Dogen helps us get a little closer to understanding this practice. It’s just a couple of pages–if you have time, give it a read and bring to Thurday’s talk.
This hybrid event is free and registration is not required. Please arrive five to ten minutes ahead of the scheduled time.
To participate online, please click on the zoom link below.
sit.mountaincloud.org
Passcode: mountain22
Trouble logging on to our online sits? Click here for guidance. Need help with time zone conversion? Use the World Time Buddy.
If you miss a dharma talk, you can find it on our YouTube channel within one to two weeks.
Kindly consider contributing dana (a traditional Buddhist offering) to express financial gratitude to our teacher. Dana to Nancy can be made through Paypal: nancyebaker@earthlink.net
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Nancy Mujo Baker Roshi is is a distinguished Zen teacher and writer, renowned as the founding teacher of the No Traces Sangha within the lineage of Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum Sangha. A Dharma successor to Bernie Glassman, she is among the first fully empowered lay Soto Zen teachers. She is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College, where she taught for more than forty years, and the author of Opening to Oneness: A Practical and Philosophical Guide to the Zen Precepts. She lives in New York City.
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Teisho literally means “presentation of the shout.” It is not a lecture or a didactic discourse but a direct sharing of the dharma springing from the teacher’s experience. A teisho or dharma talk is not intended to engage the discursive mind. Rather, the invitation is to let the language wash over the listener and, if something strikes, to let that resound.
At Mountain Cloud, teisho often take up a koan, a record of an exchange between Chan/Zen masters or masters and disciples that conveys the world they are sharing and carries the seeds of awakening. Teisho invite us to keep company with the ancestors whose practice-awakening (a term from Dogen) is freshly conveyed each time we turn to this living tradition.
