Meeting the Inconceivable | Zen Koans, Dreams & the Creative Life

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a deep, strange koan in which a student asks Yunmen, "Where do all the Buddhas come from?" And, Yunmen answers: "East mountain walks on the water." Pondering the inevitable questions that appear as part of koan study, like where do we come from, and what is the source of this existence we find ourselves part of, Tarrant considers the traditions of Zen a...

In this episode, Roshi Tess Beasley speaks about the nature of self-consciousness and how the koan path slowly guides us through the process of discovering our part in it all. It also ferrets out our strategies for making a separate self that cannot bear the intimacy of awakening. If we imagine that we are "us", it can be difficult to stare into someone's eyes for a long time until we envision our...

Join Roshi Allison Atwill to explore awakening as a great voyage, one that is entirely your own, and yet in which you are somehow accompanied by the entire universe. Atwill tells the riveting story of one sailor's solo journey around Cape Horn and reveals how, in the end, he gives up on the mind that races and compares, and turns toward Tahiti...a beacon for his true nature. What does it mean to g...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant tackles the first great gate of koan study, in which a student asks, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" And, Zhaozhou simply answers, "No," (translated as "Mu" in Japanese, and "Wu" in Chinese). Exploring the vivid commentaries that accompany this foundational koan case, including instructions to "cut off the mind road" and "make your whole body a mass of d...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a koan from The Gateless Gate collection in which the Buddha tells his attendant, "That person is like a fine racehorse who runs at the mere shadow of a whip." Tarrant investigates our relationship to suffering, describing the four kinds of horse metaphors in Zen Buddhism, ranging from the one who runs at the mere shadow of the whip to the one who must...

Fire is the vital element of transformation. In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant discusses the Zen koan, Put Out the Fire Across the River, which originally arose in response to seeing the camp fires of Genghis Khan's army burn brightly through the night. Fire has a terrifying power for destruction but also a sacred role in connecting us. Like the old alchemists, we must immerse ourselves in somet...

In this episode, Roshi Allison Atwill tells the story of Baizhang's Fox, a classic koan from The Gateless Gate collection about the nature of karma. In this koan case, an old man confesses he was once abbot of the mountain temple, but was sentenced to live 500 lives as a fox for misapprehending the nature of cause and effect. The story of his eventual freedom touches on the relief we find in reali...

Telling stories of how we are most deeply transformed by the encounters we try to keep at bay, Beasley reveals the tenderness that emerges when we can just simply feel how connected to everything we already are. Listen in to discover the red thread in your own life. "Somehow in the silence, we find each other." - Tess Beasley. Learn more about this episode of Meeting the Inconceivable at https://w...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant explores a koan from The Blue Cliff Record featuring great Yunmen, great Cloud-Gate: A student asked Yunmen, "When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what's that?" Yunmen said, "The Golden Wind reveals itself." — transl. by John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland Exploring the beauty and wistfulness of Autumn, Tarrant describes it as a time of connecting with the eter...

Koans transform us through immersion and saturation, by dissolving the usual boundaries we keep between us and the world. If you have an unanswerable question, the koan is designed to open it. Today's episode explores a koan from the Miscellaneous Collection that poses: In the Sea of Ise, 10,000 feet down, lies a single stone. I want to pick up that stone without getting my hands wet. Roshi John T...

Today's episode centers on awakening as a practice of intimacy. Roshi John Tarrant takes up koan case 89 from The Blue Cliff Record: Yunyan asked Daowu, "How does Guanyin use all those hands and eyes?" Daowu answered, "It's like feeling behind you for a pillow in the middle of the night." "I understand." "What do you understand?" "The whole body is hands and eyes." "That's very well expressed, but...