Zen Mind

This talk was given the day before a Bodhisattva Precepts Ceremony (Jukai) for five members of the Boulder Zen Center sangha. After describing the ceremony's lineage papers and the intentional family one joins by receiving the precepts, the talk turns to a difficulty. The grave precepts tend to land as a should, like a parental commandment, in what the talk calls the "structure of should," a morally superior part instructing a guilty one. This structure divides us within ourselves and, in the same movement, from other people, and it offers no freedom. The only door is to discover that—underneath our delusions and superficial desires—we already want what the precepts ask. In Zen the precepts are expressions of the awakening mind. It’s the soft, resonant, kind mind that arises through zazen, where interdependence is felt rather than thought. Because we inevitably lose this mind, the talk takes up trust and repentance, the latter understood as melting rather than self-punishment. It closes by observing that enacting this mind also asks for learned adult skills, not spontaneity alone, and encourages receiving the ceremony as a door into trusting one's own awakening mind.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center in partnership with Dharma Gates, an organization dedicated to opening pathways into formal meditation practice for young adults. The talk's central concern, however, reaches well beyond any one stage of life. It begins from the etymology of satisfaction—Latin satis (enough) and facere (to make)—and frames meditation as the practice of letting what is here be enough. Set against this is the recognition that our culture functions as a dissatisfaction machine: an economy that must grow, technology that must improve, advertising that manufactures needs we did not know we had, screens whose scroll generates comparison with lives far from our own. Anxious becoming is the felt shape of life organized around a hopefully better future. The point is not to negate the challenges that arise in different arenas of life—work, relationships, meaning, spiritual path—but to shift the ground from which they are met. "Just now is enough" relocates the present as one's whole experiential field in which one is already breathing and functioning. From there, the next step does not have to be forced; it unfolds.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given during a zazen intensive at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk holds a question often left unasked: what is the role of vow in Zen practice? It opens with a confession of skepticism. Vow can become superego, a new identity to monitor against. The talk works through this tension by tracing how way-seeking mind emerges from the friction of misrepresenting ourselves as substantial, separate selves within a reality that is undivided activity. Just sitting already contains the dynamic of practice: a backward step into undifferentiated awareness and a forward step into responsive engagement. Vow's role is not to add discipline on top of this. It is to keep reconnecting practice to way-seeking mind, because for most of us its felt urgency is not consistently present.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk is about how aliveness wants to unfold through our life process. It opens with the question of what it means to find an activity that expresses one's aliveness (for example gardening), and how to widen it so it can inform all of life's activities. The talk names five unfoldings of a "realizational life": aliveness, order, expression, form, and Way. Each requires the practitioner's awake participation; none can be skipped or forced. The talk also names three ways aliveness can be displaced rather than expressed in the present: deferral into the future, nostalgia, and longing for an imagined other life. A turning word is offered for each. The talk closes on the practice that holds the whole movement together—noticing where one actually is and meeting that place fully. To be awake to the unfolding is already a realizational life.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was offered on Day 3 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center, continuing the investigation of mind begun the previous day (published two weeks ago). The inquiry turns to the koan exchange between Damei and Matsu: "What is Buddha?" – "This very mind is Buddha." Dogen warns that students have misunderstood this teaching in two ways. The first error is to equate Buddha with the ordinary functioning of mind—thinking, feeling, perceiving—which leads to complacency: if I'm already Buddha, why practice? The second error is subtler, taking the field of awareness as an eternal soul or spiritual essence that stands behind and survives the passing show of experience. Both errors are forms of grasping. In one we grasp the contents of mind, in the other we grasp the field itself. The solution Dogen points toward is not a third thing to grasp but a release from grasping altogether. When Dogen says "the mind is mountains, rivers, and earth," he is not pointing to something behind experience but to full inhabitation of form, both liberation and a more complete entry into the world as living, dynamic appearance.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is now available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.