Buddhist Temple of Toledo Podcast

Jay Rinsen Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on July 30, 2008. "The mind of the great sage of India was intimately conveyed from West to East. Among human beings are wise ones and fools, but in the Way there is no northern or southern patriarch." - Shih-T'ou, Identity of Relative and Absolute For more information about the Toledo Zen Center, please visit toledozen.org...

Rinsen's talk from the Toledo Zen Center community retreat, December 14, 2008.

Jay Rinsen Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on July 27, 2008. "I've built a grass roof hut, where there's nothing of value. After eating, I relax and enjoy a nap. When it was completed, fresh weeds appeared. Now it's been lived in - covered by weeds. The person in the hut lives here calmly, not stuck to inside, outside, or in between." -- Shih-T'ou For more information about...

Rinsen's Zazenkai talk on December 14th, 2008.

A talk by Rinsen at the Toledo Zen Center's community retreat. December 12, 2008. Part 1 of 4.

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on July 27, 2008. "Shih-Tou's awakening happened as he read this passage from the teachings of the early scholar monk Seng-Chow: "'The Ultimate Self is empty and void.  Though it lacks form, the myriad things are all of its making.  One who understands the myriad things as the Self, isn't that a sage?' "That seeming dichotomy...

Jay Rinsen Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on July 16, 2008. "Mostly, our mind remains fixed in what's called a dualistic state...which means being trapped, unawaredly in a way of perceiving the universe such that everything is shattered, separate and distinct... In the practice of Zen, there is uncovered another way of perceiving, a way that's not bound by the trap...

Visited by a local University World Religions class, Rinsen contextualizes Zen practice and awakening within religious Tradition. "Most religious traditions are founded with the experience or essential insight of an individual or group of individuals who have some unique way of perceiving themselves and the world that fits the society that they find themselves in, in a way that hadn't happened bef...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on June 11, 2008. "Develop meditation that is like the earth, for when you develop meditation that is like the earth, agreeable and disagreeable contexts will not invade your mind and remain. Just as people throw clean things and dirty things, excrement, urine, spittle, pus and blood on the earth, and the earth is no...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on June 4, 2008. "One of the primary ways that we do great harm to ourselves and to those around us is by becoming attached to a particular view. 'Attached' here means a very specific thing: it means sort of an unexamined clinging that has almost a panting, desperate quality to it. The majority of these views, these...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on May 28, 2008. "Long seeking it through others, I was far from reaching it. Now I go by myself and I meet it everywhere. I now am not it, and just now, it is nothing but myself. Understanding this way, I can be as I am." -Master Dong-Shan For more information about the Toledo Zen Center, please visit toledozen.org...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on May 21, 2008. "In studying the teachings of the Buddhadharma, in studying reality, what we're actually studying is ourselves.... Ironically enough, the way of studying those teachings, the way of studying that Self, is that you have to get the Self out of the picture.... What that means, what that's pointing to, i...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on May 18, 2008. "Styling himself a latter-day Vimalakirti framed Wang Wei's dual life in the most positive terms. Not as a split or a straddle, one foot in the affairs in state, the other in monkhood, but as a unity; the best of both worlds. It states his understanding that fundamentally there are not two worlds, pure and im...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on May 18, 2008. "Mindful creativity - or Zen art, if you will - requires a certain kind of consciousness to be able to really call itself Zen art. There's a quality required, expressed in the body, of tranquillity; open, receptive, clear, awake presence. It's absolutely essential. In other words, not discriminating, not judg...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on May 18, 2008. Hidden on this mountain, many Buddhist monks Chant sutras, meditate together; Men on distant city walls gazing towards the peaks See only white, enshrouding clouds. -Wang Wei, A Poem to my Brothers and Sisters For more information about the Toledo Zen Center, please visit toledozen.org . The Toledo Zen Center...

In honor of the first anniversary of the Drinking Gourd Podcast, Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives an interview at the Toledo Zen Center on October 22, 2008. "When I finally got to see a full-out Zen monastery, I was hooked. It really helped me by providing a specific way of working on this, and working with this whole contemplative intelligence, that I couldn't find in the Western approach." For more...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on May 14, 2008. "To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many people, to want to help everyone and everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." -Thomas Martin,...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on May 7, 2008. "If with kindly generosity one merely has the wish to soothe the aching heads of other beings, such merit knows no bounds. No need to speak, then, if the wish to drive away the endless pain of each and every living being, bringing them unbounded virtues." -Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva For mo...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on April 30, 2008. "How do you take a spiritually awakened individual and how does that individual engage their life? What are the qualities of an awakened being in the world? ...One of the aspects that you'll find in any of the traditions is there's an embracing of this sort of luminal not-knowing." For more informa...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a talk and discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on April 23, 2008. "Elements of the self come and go like clouds, without purpose. Greed, hate, and delusion appear and disappear like ocean foam. When you reach the heart of reality, you find neither self nor other, and even the worst kind of karma dissolves at once." -Yung-Chia For more information about the Toledo Zen C...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on April 20, 2008. "Let others criticise you. Let them condemn you. Trying to set the sky on fire, they'll just end up exhausted. I hear abusive words as though I were drinking ambrosia; everything melts, and suddenly I enter the inconceivable. When you understand the real value of abuse, your worst critic becomes a wise frie...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on April 20, 2008. "Seeing into the fundamental fact, you see into its expression as well." -Yung-Chia For more information about the Toledo Zen Center, please visit toledozen.org . The Toledo Zen Center is a member of the Hermitage Heart Sangha, online at hermitageheart.org .

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik leads a retreat workshop at the Toledo Zen Center on April 20, 2008. "Haven't you met someone seasoned in the Way of Ease, a person with nothing to do and nothing to master, who neither rejects thought nor seeks truth? The real nature of ignorance is buddha-nature itself. The empty, illusory body is the very body of the Dharma. When the Dharma-body is realized, there's nothi...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads a discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on April 16, 2008. "Coming from a Judeo-Christian theistically-based approach, there's an unconscious assumption -- or teaching, basically -- that moral and ethical guidelines come from someplace outside... something outside saying, 'This is what I expect.' In the teachings of the Buddhadharma, the moral and ethica...

Jay Rinsen Chikyo Weik gives a talk and leads a discussion at the Toledo Zen Center on April 9, 2008. "One of the things that people run smack into when they come to a place like this for the first time is, there's a bunch of ritual happening. What's that all about? What's the deal with all the bowing and the incense and all that kind of thing? These are moments of re-awakening, if they're used we...