The Jizo-an Zen Community Podcast

In our current state of the world we witness how misinformation spreads like a virus. We witness again and again how easy it is to manipulate others, create division, and spread hatred through wrong speech. In the eight fold noble path the Buddha instructed us on the importance of right speech. When we pay close attention to our words and use them skillfully we can create heaven on Earth. Let us u...

"You are Buddha, you are perfect and complete". Most of us would vehemently disagree... for good reason too. We spend lifetimes unconsciously creating fantasies about who we think we are. Just like if you took a dog and trained it to be a killer, there would be no surprise if that were to actually occur. But the dog's true essence is not a killer. We too have 'trained' ourselves to see life throug...

Eihei Dogen, the great master of Soto Zen, taught that when we know something intimately, it ceases to exist in the old way and, as a result, so do we. Dogen was a lover of nature. He built his monastery deep in the mountains near streams. In the Mountains and Rivers Sutra he wrote about the mountains and rivers, the wind and clouds, as direct expressions of the great body of the Buddha, the whole...

What does it mean to practice the Noble Eightfold Path's 'Right View'? How do we walk the Buddha's teaching of the Middle Way? ​ Master Shitou shared his deep insight into these questions with two profound poems that became the foundation of the Soto Zen School: The 'Sandokai' and the 'Song of the Grass Roof Hermitage.' We will look into maintaining this life of balancing the Absolute and the Rela...

How does one practice without attachments to goals or gaining anything? Zen does not place an emphasis on advancing through stages of practice, or expectations of achieving anything. But when one embraces this path wholeheartedly, we mature as a result of opening the heart, seeing through delusions, and directly experiencing the transformative fruit of practice in our life. ​ Unobstructed, the pri...

From a Zen perspective, animals teach profound spiritual and philosophical lessons like living fully in the present moment, unconditional love, natural joy, letting go of past hurts and the wisdom of rest. ​ Through their honest communication and mindful presence, they encourage us to be more patient, compassionate, and to find peace by letting go of over-thinking and focusing on the here and now....

For those touched by awakening, the complexities of existence allow for words to be molded like clay… and so poetry lends itself to the wonderful mysteries of what lies beyond the temporal and transitory…not allowing the reader to fully put their finger on it, for it would just be another case of the finger pointing at the moon. Each time the Dharma is composed into intellectual and coherent vocab...

In 1994, the late American Zen master, Roshi, Bernie Glassman founded the Zen peacemakers; an organization of practitioners and teachers that has grown globally. He also established the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers, a path of practice to relieve the suffering of all beings through contemplative social action. Those three tenets – Not Knowing, Bearing Witness and Compassionate Action are a f...

When we begin walking this path, we start the process of taking refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Then, we may come to the realization that we are ready to take formal refuge as we experience the transformation that naturally happens when we make the genuine commitment to fully embrace this way of being in the world. Let's explore the meaning of the powerful statement and action of...

First, the Buddha, and then Dogen Zenji, in their final lessons to us, described eight qualities to guide us as Bodhisattvas in training. These eight are necessary to develop if we are to become true adults and to step past the un-resolved, erratic emotions that continue in the unconscious mind, so that we may actualize the Buddha field in our everyday life.

In Buddhism, the three poisons of greed, anger, and ignorance are regarded as mental, afflictions, that cloud the mind, and are the root cause of our suffering and discontentment. Our conditioned reaction is to see these poisons simply as enemies that must be avoided or eliminated. But, what if we see them as our teachers and the very springboard to insight and awakening?

In Zen we do a lot of bowing. But there is so much more to a bow than just bending. Bowing is a practice of gratitude and non-duality. It is a physical expression of the Buddha's teaching. The dropping away of the ego and its myriad attachments. A bow represents the merging of heart and mind, compassion and wisdom.

These two possibilities are relative and absolute or if you like, awareness and ignorance…the point of speaking about the one reality is to help an individual pull himself out of the one-sided relative reality that 99% of us live in—me and you. Like everything in life, this requires balance, diligence, and effort. Just as a seesaw works best when the two weights are similar, our lives find balance...

We have largely been conditioned to believe that we need to constantly push ourselves very hard and make strenuous efforts to attain, achieve, or become this or that. We often bring this same mentality to our spiritual practice, believing that we must make strenuous efforts to awaken and realize our true nature. Dogen Zenji described practice as the dharma gate of ease and joy. He emphasized dilig...

There is a frequently quoted Zen saying - Seven times knocked down, eight times get up - that speaks to a core aspect of practice and training: namely, the cultivation of unflagging perseverance, even in the midst of the most difficult circumstances. The dharma points to the essential nature of great determination on the spiritual path because it recognizes the necessity for deep resolve in our ev...

Attending to the breath​ is the simplest of instructions for marshaling our attention into the current moment. Yet we tend to fall back again and again into thinking about, musing, judging and projecting our wants and needs upon our experience of it. Fortunately we can train the mind with a simple hint to maintain our focus and deepen our practice of zazen — stealing our attention back from the wa...

For many traditional religions, doubt is often seen as a weakness, a lack of faith, or the very antithesis of faith. Seen in this way, mere belief can harden into unquestioned dogma or doctrine. However, in Buddhism, and perhaps especially in Zen, Great Doubt is one of the foundations of practice, and is interconnected and inseparable from Great Faith. The great Zen Master Boshan taught that unlik...

It's been 50 years since the fall of Saigon, the moment that ended the Vietnam War. The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, signaled the end of South Vietnam. In the chaos leading up to that day, hundreds of thousands fled, many by sea, in search of safety and a future. The total loss of human life from the war is staggering. According to the Buddha, the mind is the source of all actions. It is most...

Conditioned by a world that strives to "win," it's not easy to see how this sense of "I must become something or someone" is the underlying cause of suffering. For many reasons, it's rare for us humans to recognize that what we are, at any given moment, is enough...and so ambition becomes the con-man for the ego...the dog chasing it's tail. If you can step back (or out) of the clouds of the one il...

"There is, monks, this way that leads only to the purification of beings, to the overcoming of sorrow and distress, to the disappearance of pain and sadness, to the gaining of the right path, to the realization of Nirvana – that is to say the four foundations of mindfulness". These are the opening words of the Buddha's discourse on mindfulness in the Satipatthana Sutta. We will examine the Buddha'...

This sutra is a wonderful example of how easy it is to misunderstand teachings of the Buddhadharma. The sutra recounts a story of one of the Buddha's monks, Arittha, who lived in the Anathapindika Monastery in the Jeta Park with the Sangha...Arittha was heard by his brothers to say that 'sense pleasures were not an obstacle to the practice', which of course went contrary to the teaching of the Bud...

"The Great Way is not difficult, it only avoids picking and choosing." These are the words of the Third Patriarch of Chan, Seng Ts'an. This phrase is perhaps the greatest single-sentence summary of Zen practice. In other words, if we transcend all preferences, distinctions, and opinions or dualistic views, the true nature of reality is revealed and "everything becomes clear and undisguised." Howev...

Humility, the feeling that we all share common ground – feeling neither superior or inferior to others – is both a prerequisite to awakening and an expression of mature spirituality. Central to our practice is the phrase "I don't know" which permeates every aspect of Zen. It stands as a powerful symbol of humility and openness. It's an acknowledgment of the inherent limitations of our understandin...

In Zen Buddhism, faith and doubt are inseparable. Along with determination these three make up what are known as the three pillars of practice…. Great Faith, Great Doubt and Great Determination. Faith in Buddhism has nothing to do with believing in anything outside of ourselves. It's faith in our own true nature. However, it does require faith that Zen practice is worthwhile, faith in the reality...

The lines of reality have always been blurred by the fantastic hallucinations and desires of the mind...this is at the core of the Buddha's teachings- The 'mind made reality' and Reality are very different. In the last 200 years or so, man continues to make impacts on the earth and the psyche of future generations that propel us faster and faster into a state of believing that more and more stuff...