Earth Dreams: Zen Buddhism and the Soul of the World

This is the first of a series of talks exploring the Ox-herding pictures, a set of teachings on the Zen path of Awakening. This first stage is foundational and is often called The Search, Arousing the Mind of Awakening or Awakening Bodhicitta. Each of the Ox-Herding pictures includes a stanza and a poem. The stanza reads as a teaching to accompany the image. What follows below is an excerpt of thi...

I originally started this Substack as a clear way to share my weekly dharma talks. Every Monday at 6P PT / 9P ET I host an online Zen gathering through the Zen Community of Oregon where I am one of the teachers. The gathering begins with two twenty minute periods of meditation, followed by a Dharma Talk. Dharma Talks are ways of connecting to the voice of the ancestors, the path of awakening that...

KOAN: Yun Men imparted some words saying, "Everyone has a light; when you look at it, you don't see it and it's dark and dim. What is everybody's light?"  He himself answered on their behalf, "The kitchen pantry and the main gate." He also said, "A good thing isn't as good as nothing.” POEM: Spontaneously shining, bathed in solitary light  It is an open secret Flowers fall, the tree has no shadow...

The path of the paramitas leads to the shore of freedom, of liberation / love. OM ! Gate, gate, para gate, parasum gate, bodhi svaha Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone to the other shore–Svaha! Oh what a realization! The zen buddhist path is a path of mystery as much as it is a path of awakening, when we speak of awakening, we usually invoke a sense of realization, understanding, wisdom, knowing—enligh...

How do we practice saving a ghost, when that ghost seems to be everywhere? In the zen buddhist tradition we have the archetype of the hungry ghost—a being who is often depicted as having a large belly and a teeny-tiny throat and a tongue of fire. The hungry ghost is always wanting, yet never, never satisfied. Sound familiar? We all host parts of ourselves that seem to be constantly wanting & never...

Offer flowers on a distant mountain to all beings —Dogen Zenji In this dharma talk we explore the beautiful practice of giving, generosity, on the three levels of experience, Inner, Outer and Secret. The invitation here is to open to the inherent generosity of life itself and explore ways we can cultivate and infuse generosity in our lives and practice. The talk opens with the poem below: simple g...

To follow one’s longing. Or even to listen to one’s longing–can be uncomfortable. It can be deeply inconvenient. Painful to feel this desire, this wanting, this longing for completion, wholeness, to love fully. We sense that to listen to such a longing can be destructive. Yes, mystical longing asks something from us. Sacrifice, surrender, giving up, letting go. We have this word in the Buddhist tr...

In order to live our vows, or to live from our life purpose we will encounter challenges. During this talk we explore some common inner challenging voices or parts of us that may get activated as we endeavor to live our vows. These voices in voices dialogue parts work are often named the perfectionist, pusher and inner critic. As we conclude this series of talks on vow and purpose—we remember the...

We live our visions for ourselves and the world. If we see that world as a hopeless place, inevitably we will treat it as such. The Buddhas and Ancestors remind us, that this very land is the place of awakening, this very body, the body of awakening. This talk is an exploration in connecting with our biggest vision for ourselves and the world. As well as some practical magic for connecting with su...

The Dharma empowers us to ask essential questions. This talk is an invitation to question, to really question and to live into these questions. Often when we think about our life purpose, we makes assumptions about ourselves and the world that stem from fixed beliefs or inherited perspectives. For example the dharma invites a very different view of ourselves and the world, then say neo-capitalism...

The question of life purpose is one that comes up throughout our lives. Maybe you are in a life transition Maybe you started out pursuing one career because family or societal pressure and now want to do something that is more in alignment with your heart Maybe you are in a career change for another more unexpected reason Or are feeling the heat of the climate crisis and fraying of culture–that yo...

A common phrase you may hear in Zen meditation groups is: What is your practice? In this talk I explore the thread that runs through all practice forms, as well as clarifying how our different meditation methods (concentration, embodiment, inquiry, loving kindness/compassion and open awareness) fit together. This is an exploration of the spiritual path in both the broad and specific ways it manife...

Part of being human is that we have big emotional responses or have emotional responses. There is nothing wrong with having emotional responses. What often happens is that we are afraid of feeling our emotions. We are afraid of our fear. Parts-work has one way of languaging this that I have found helpful, buddhism has another way which I also feel is helpful. In parts-work language: parts of us go...

Spaciousness/emptiness is considered the Ground of Being or the Mind-ground—the heart of who we are. Here spaciousness is love. But maybe not love in the traditional way that we think of love, which is often conditional.  Often our loving has to do with–if you really loved me you would do…or say…or show it in some specific way that we feel like we need, or want, or must have in order to really fee...

Emptiness is an often misunderstood concept in modern Buddhist practice, partially because it is not really a concept so much as a realization. Yet, without the concept we can’t really prepare for what opens up in this path of practice or we may miss the freedom that is part of this path. To talk about emptiness is of course, not the same as realizing emptiness. In this talk I unpack emptiness as...

Exploring the Great Element Fire we are invited into the heat within our bodies. Fire illuminates the heat of our living and connects us to our passions. In this talk we are invited to feel the heat of life within and also to reflect on spiritual longing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit amykisei.substack.com/subs...

In the Mountains and Waters Sutra, we are invited to study water--to take it up as our body and mind? This level of intimacy is characteristic of the Zen school. Water is alive and life-giving. In Mahayana Buddhism the archetype of Compassion is depicted as the Goddess Kannon, transmuting her tears of grief for the suffering in the world, into Compassion. This Dharma Talk explores the teachings of...

The Water Element makes up around 65% of the human body. To attend to the element water we are invited to feel the gravity and flow of embodied experience. Contemplative practitioners throughout time use the images of bodies of water: ocean, lake, river -- to point to aspects of our nature. Flowing yet still, wavey and deep -- the invitation is one of all inclusive awareness, where wave and ocean,...

The first of a five series exploration into the teachings of the Five Great Elements. In this episode we explore the Great Element Earth through embodiment, presence, contemplations on interconnection and the practice of generosity. If we lose connection to the Earth, our lives are chaotic. —Zenju Earthlyn Manuel How do you stay embodied? How do you practice presence? This is a public episode. If...

What we believe shapes how we perceive. If we think that we are separate from all the rest of life, we live an isolated life--ignoring the everyday magic of the earth, relationships and our human hearts and minds. In this episode we explore how view shapes our life, and what it's like to try on different views. Such as seeing our life as sacred. We also explore the practice of presence as a celebr...

The miscellaneous koans of the Zen lineage are image rich, as is much of the teachings on awakening found in the Zen literature. In this talk we will open to the image of the koan Count the Stars in the Night Sky and discover within our own soma the wisdom and power of such a simple phrase. This is an invitation to enter both body and image as a way of utilizing the imagination as part of the awak...

One of the great gifts of the Zen tradition is it's teachings on emptiness. Far from being nihilistic, the teachings and practices of emptiness remind us of the inherent spontaneity and creativity of the universe. This talk explores koan as a technology of awakening, and invites us into koan practice in an engaging way. Time is spent exploring the koan, Everyone Has Their Own Light by Zen Teacher...

In this dharma talk Kisei explore's the phrase from Hongzhi in Silent Illumination: If serenity neglects illumination; murkiness leads to wasted dharma. This life is a play of emptiness and illumination, yin & yang. When the emptiness side (which also can be defined as silence, serenity, darkness, unknowing) gets off balance--what happens to our lives? our practice? our awakening? This talk is a d...

In this talk we explore illumination as an aspect of our awakened nature, sometimes experienced as clarity, brightness, lucidity, alertness. We also look at what happens when illumination is overly emphasized in our spiritual practice and our culture.  We are following the teachings of Zen Master Hongzhi from his poem on Silent Illumination, in this stanza he reminds us: If illumination neglects s...

We all have had experiences of being in the flow of life. What is this flow? How do we find it? What do learn from the times that we feel obstructed, and what do we learn from being in the flow? Inspired by Zen Master Hongzhi's poem Silent Illumination, this talk explores the flow of the natural world as well as the research on flow & the flow-state by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. This is a public epi...