Brooklyn Zen Center

The Bodhisattva vow of living for the liberation of all beings, even before my own, to raise up in the heart the liberation of all beings — this is the most powerful interrupter and lover of karma. This vow turns everything toward karma.

Sometimes you sit down – or I sit down – because there is fear. But that is still a fearless choice to face your fear, to understand your fear. Bodhisattva can have fear, but does not live from fear. Fear is not the source of Bodhisattva activity.

We deeply desire to be in accord with the natural functioning of life, with dependent co-arising, with the way things interact and support each other, without these false senses of separation. That is what our heart and our lives desire in the deepest sense.

This is our practice, the practice of love, the practice of intimacy. That’s why we offer a relationship with a teacher, and we offer sangha, so we can work this way with each other.

We are training ourselves – in our bodies, in our minds, through the practice, through the teachings – to make it more likely that in a moment of suffering, in a moment of threat, that we will be able to have an intention to, and maybe some sort of capacity to respond to courageous connection, instead of tightening into separation and division.

For me the most powerful things the vows do are because of their impossible nature — they are humbling. They have a kind of leveling effect. In the face of this impossible vow, I’m one person in a community. So there is an aspect of confession in that vow, of acknowledging our humanness and our limited view. So there is a humbling and tenderizing effect of the vow, that enables us to o...

We can cultivate this sense of great expansive unconditioned love. That allows us to meet the difficulty in life without turning away and without getting caught.

We really need human beings that are devoted to the difficult spiritual path required to release the full light of love into the world.

How do we work through our pain, through our numbness? How do we regain a sense of aliveness?

I would suggest a mind that is awake, and that settles, and that finds love, joy, and ease in precariousness, so that we can be with each other, and love each other, and support each other. In very real, concrete meaningful ways.

I think that this gender work is very important for us, it’s a real big doorway, and very deep.

In whatever way Buddhas are directing their attention, their abiding and dwelling happens there.

[We can think of] these arising traumas, these beings as I like to think of them, as survival strategies of our ancestors. So fear, anxiety, anger, rage, or joy – these are blood memories. And we all have them, we all carry them. And if we can open them up, see and work with them, we can transform them; we can see what the wisdom is there for us.

When we talk about karma, it’s a way of talking about causality or cause and effects, specifically in human life, in human moral life. It’s the effect we cause on the world through our intentions – through our volition, through our will. And the Buddha was clear that when we are looking at the effects we are having, we have to pay attention not just to our actions, but we have to...

When we work on ourselves deeply enough, when we really are in touch with our own fundamental openness of heart, which really is there, the love that we have for ourselves and other people comes from a place of unconditioned openness. That is what you feel, tremendous gratitude – for every single person. And when you meet them, you are meeting yourself. You are meeting a mystery that we both...

This darkness, this mystery of who we are, and how we are together, and how we are being influenced all the time, is to be honored and to be listened to, and is necessary for our wholeness.

In the way of the Buddha, karma is always in the background. It’s like the little key that unlocks all these teachings. When you kind of understand that, as I’m sure many of you do, when we understand that karma is such an important teaching, it unlocks all these teachings. This is the teaching of karma.

The Bodhisattva path is a counterintuitive approach. It’s a method to help us let go of this obsession over ourselves. This is very different from our usual mode of operation, if you think about it. That is why it feels counterintuitive, and it can take a really long time for us to really understand and to get into it. We are very much conditioned by the world around us, by the opposite way of bei...

When we come together and sit, then we are supporting each other. And this is a interesting practice, to think that the person sitting next to me is practicing dying. And that when someone is stuck — we use that word when someone is stuck in their conditioning — that part of that stuckness is the fear of dying. It is a fear of actually letting go of, a fear of grieving, it’s a fe...

To live by vow. To live by not your conditioned mind, but to live with intention. Beyond the little selflessness. To live by vow, is to live as the universe. This is practice realization.

We sit together, and in that sitting together we carry our individual practice. But also there is no distinction among us, we are sitting together. And together we are actually supporting each other’s practice. We are not sitting in a cave by yourself, we are sitting right next to each other. It’s lovely, I saw that during this last period of zazen. This is the tradition we have been given....

Sometimes that Buddha ancestral connection is represented between a teacher and a student – which Dogen talks a lot about – but it can be represented by our relationship to the Buddhas and ancestors we don’t see right in front of us, that we know came before us. And so we speak to them about what it is we wish to renounce and what is we wish to manifest, and we ask for their support.

Practice is taking that step time and time again and slamming again and again into the reality that the world is not built for me, around me, by me alone. That my story is just that – a story. And that there is a reality that I am a part of, that other beings are a part of, and would not happen without all of us.

In order to get free in this human life we have to meet these parts that are really broken at times. They are not broken out of hatred. They are broken out of a lack of love.

We are in a time where being able to take refuge in each other, being of service to each other, being a community that can rely on each other – this is something that we put forward, and that we understand that zazen is certainly important, our ritual practice is certainly important. But our sangha is the thing that will allow all of that to be. And that our deep service to each other will r...