Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

Episode Description: The morning following Zazenkai, Roshi Norman revisits Dogen’s text “The King of Samadhis” and invites participants to explore their own practice in a question and answer period. . Bio: Roshi Zoketsu Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. For many years he has taught at the San Francisco Zen Center, the oldest and largest of the new Buddhist organizations in the West, where he served as Co-abbot from 1995-2000. He is presently a Senior Dharma Teacher there as well as the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. You can access Part 1 of this 2 part series by clicking here.

Episode Description: During the first Zazenkai of the Practice Period, a one-day retreat of deep sitting and practice, Roshi Norman talks about Dogen’s essay “Zanmai-O-Zanmai,” or “The King of Samadhis.” Norman explores Dogen’s claim that Zazen, its dignified posture and steadfast sitting, is “the only authentic teaching of the Buddha.” With regard to how we serve the world, Norman suggests that it helps us to know and feel that in our sitting all beings are becoming Buddhas. Bio: Roshi Zoketsu Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. For many years he has taught at the San Francisco Zen Center, the oldest and largest of the new Buddhist organizations in the West, where he served as Co-abbot from 1995-2000. He is presently a Senior Dharma Teacher there as well as the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. You can access Part 2 of this 2 part series by clicking here.

Episode Description: Wendy begins this Dharma talk by discussing the Buddhist teaching of the "three gifts:" the gift of material wealth or food, the gift of the teachings, and the gift of non-fear. She touches upon the ancestral trio of crops called the "three sisters:" corn, beans, and squash. Wendy also advises us to get in touch with "what we are hungry for," and "what nourishes us," and to discover how to "satisfy our hunger." We can satisfy our hunger through an "honorable harvest," which gives us the nourishment to "get up and serve." Wendy then reads an excerpt from Robin Wall Kimmerer's book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which includes a set of "guidelines for an honorable harvest." The talk ends with a lengthy Q&A. Bio: Wendy Johnson is a Buddhist meditation teacher and organic gardening mentor who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wendy has been practicing Zen meditation for thirty-five years and has led meditation retreats nationwide since 1992 as an ordained lay dharma teacher in the traditions of Vietnamese teacher Thich Nhat Hanh and the San Francisco Zen Center. Wendy is one of the founders of the organic Farm and Garden Program at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County, where she lived with her family from 1975 to 2000. She has been teaching gardening and environmental education to the public since the early 1980s. In 2000 Wendy and her husband, Peter Rudnick, received the annual Sustainable Agriculture Award from the National Ecological Farming Association. Since 1995 Wendy has written a quarterly column, “On Gardening,” for Tricycle Magazine, a Buddhist Review. She was honored in The Best Science and Nature Writing 2000, published by Houghton Mifflin. Wendy is a mentor and advisor to the Edible Schoolyard program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, a project that she has been involved in since in its inception in 1995. This is her first book.

Episode Description: Final discussion session of the program. Topics include: How to train within a culture of awakening, how to find or create "secular buddhist" community, the scientific investigation of reincarnation, a sharing from a program participant, the critique of buddhism as the "opiate of the middle classes," and philosophy as a practice or way of life. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: This seventh and final lecture of the program is entitled Towards a Culture of Awakening. Stephen begins to wrap up the program by reminding participants that the fourth task among the buddha's four tasks is the "cultivation of a path." When we cultivate something, we create a culture. So the culmination of the fourth task is a culture, a culture of awakening that can respond to our current global condition. The foundations of this culture include the central ideas presented in this program: Dwelling on the earth with care, engaging with a fourfold task, creating meaning through our choices and actions, and beholding an emptiness or nirvana free from reactivity in order to "radiate like the sun" and "flow like a stream." Stephen draws from a number of early buddhist texts in order to sketch out what such a culture of awakening might look like. In brief, it would be a culture primarily concerned with enacting a way of life grounded in human flourishing, it would encourage a response, free from hesitation, to the "unique immediacy" of our individual lives, it would be rooted in the eightfold path as an integrated ethical framework based on care, and it would, crucially, not privilege monastic over lay practice. After a brief detour into how a pre-buddhist culture of awakening may have spread beyond India and taken hold in Greece, Stephen concludes with another text from the Pali canon, the Parable of the City. This parable is about building a civilization, a society built on the buddha's teachings, in short, a "culture of awakening on this earth." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: At the conclusion of the third day, Stephen and Roshi Joan address a range of questions and comments submitted by program participants. Topics include: A beautiful text by the late author and Zen priest Peter Matthiessen, a sharing from a program participant, the term "buddha nature," care in the light of reactivity versus responsibility, goals and aspirations in practice, and possible glosses of the word "dukkha." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: Discussion session following the sixth lecture. Topics include: Intensity and wholeheartedness, "solar living," the role of concentration or "focus" in practice, the "ascetic bias" toward monasticism in the Pali canon, the metaphor of the "bee and flowers" in the dhammapada, and the role of teachers. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: This sixth lecture of the program is entitled Solar Dharma. In it, Stephen fleshes out two metaphors found in the Pali canon, that of the "sun" and that of the "stream." Excellent research by buddhist scholar Johannes Bronkhorst suggests that, contrary to a standard view, the buddha did not live in a brahmanical culture, that is, his milieu was not "hindu." Brahmanism did not extend as far east in India as Sakya, the kingdom where the buddha lived. Furthermore, the buddha was not, in his teachings, reacting against a brahmanical worldview. Rather, the Sakyans were probably descendants of the indigenous populations of eastern India, and they probably worshipped the sun. In his teachings, the buddha does not reject this culture of sun worship but rather incorporates its metaphors into his prescription for living a vibrant life. In particular, the sun, in its loving warmth and light of wisdom, becomes a metaphor for nirvana, a space from which, like the sun, we can act with selfless generosity, constantly giving ourselves away. The second metaphor, that of the "stream," refers to the eightfold path "to be cultivated" as the fourth task. The "stream-entrant" is one who has begun down the path, flowing, living life in a "fluid and creative way." A stream-entrant has also "made the path their own" and has begun to be "independent of others" in the practice. This is not to say that "good friends," or the "noble community" of practitioners, is not important. However, stream-entrants are not blindly dependent on others. The noble community is one of "autonomous individuals" who nourish each other's practice and lives." This community is not comprised of perfect monastics. Indeed, in the buddha's time, his "assembly" included many lay people as well as "sinners." The point is that everyone is included, because the human condition is not one of perfection. We will be constantly visited by greed, hatred, and confusion. We don't practice in order to rid ourselves of these things but rather to incorporate them into a life in which we "shine like the sun and flow like a stream." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: Discussion session following the fifth lecture. Topics include: The third task and operant conditioning, reward, the contingency of all schemas, the lack of capitalization in the language of the suttas, nirvana as an open space rather than a transcendent state to attain, the world "delusion" in relation to the fourfold task and eightfold path, and how the dharma is "difficult to see." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: This fifth lecture of the program is entitled Nirvana is Now. Stephen begins by arguing that nirvana is not some transcendent state to be attained after going through a "series of arduous spiritual exercises," but rather that it is immediately available to us right now. It is already here "every time we open our hearts." He alludes to a text entitled the Second Discourse to Sivaka in discussing this immediacy of nirvana. Then, through a close reading of the text On Emptiness, Stephen speaks about what the early buddhist conception of nirvana might have been. In this text, the buddha is recorded as saying, "now I mainly live by dwelling in emptiness." It is clear from this and other early texts that emptiness is a space in which to dwell and not, as is the case for later buddhism, an object of comprehension. Emptiness in early buddhism means a space empty of reactivity, free of "greed, hatred, and delusion." In other words, emptiness is where we "behold the stopping of reactivity," which is in fact an exact description of the third task, beholding nirvana. Stephen ends the lecture by pointing out that beholding nirvana, although an important task, is by no means the "end of the story." Beholding nirvana, beholding emptiness, is not "enlightenment." Through a gloss on another early buddhist text, Stephen explains that beholding nirvana is akin to the removal of a poisoned arrow. It is an important first step in "healing." However, after the arrow is removed, the wound has to be tended to over time; it requires "therapeutic care." So while beholding nirvana is crucial, it is only the precursor to the fourth task: carefully cultivating a path, a way of life, that is in a very real way about "healing" our, and the world's, wounds. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: At the conclusion of the second day, Stephen and Roshi Joan address a range of questions and comments submitted by program participants. Topics include: Mindfulness of the body, our overvaluing of cognitive knowledge, the danger of becoming comfortable and complacent within buddhist practice, the relative difficulty of "waking up" in the modern, highly technologized world, and empathy and compassion. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: Discussion session following the fourth lecture. Topics include: The relevance of the western philosophical tradition to our understanding of early buddhism, "lay" versus "monastic" practice, the "engaged" versus "detached" stance toward life, and overtones of the word "becoming." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: This fourth lecture of the program is entitled Letting Go of Truth. In it, Stephen proposes how his formulation of a fourfold task (see part 5a of this series) evolved to become the Four Noble Truths. At some point in time, buddhism took a "metaphysical turn" from an "engaged agency" with the world, to a "theorizing stance" of a detached subject contemplating an objective world. The "theorizing stance" is one that has influenced much of western philosophy and lies at the root of modern science. In turning from engagement with the world to theorizing about the world, buddhism began to "privilege abstract knowledge over felt experience." In so doing, a "knowing how" to accomplish a series of tasks became a "knowing about" a correct view of reality. A fourfold task became a metaphysical framework. A practice became a theory. Stephen spends much of the lecture presenting scholarly evidence that the metaphysical framework of the Four Noble Truths does not appear in the earliest buddhist texts and in fact, was "grafted on" over the course of 300 to 400 years. He presents an analysis of how, gradually, a series of four tasks to be performed in order to flourish in the world transformed into four truth claims centering around suffering and the cessation of suffering. In Stephen's view, the buddha's teaching is fundamentally about "performance" rather than knowledge. The buddha "understood the world as a site for the performance of a set of liberating tasks," and the individual self as a "work in progress that recognizes, performs, and accomplishes these tasks." For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: Discussion session following the third lecture. Topics include: The balance and union of shamatha and vipassana, why we are drawn to particular spiritual practices, breath meditation, the word "prapanca," "dukkha" as a shorthand for the poignancy of life, the fact that the Pali Canon includes much more than texts exclusively about ascetic and monastic practices, and how Stephen's formulation of the fourfold task diverges from standard views of the Four Noble Truths. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts

Episode Description: This third lecture of the program is entitled A Fourfold Task. Stephen begins by offering a brief review of his two lectures from the first day of the program (parts 2a and 3a of this series). He then elegantly lays out the core of the buddha's teaching on how care, this foundational ethical stance toward life, can be "refracted into a complex of four tasks." Stephen first discusses the buddha's description of his own awakening, found in the text The Noble Quest, from the Sutta Nipata. The buddha speaks of "seeing" a twofold "ground," which includes the ground of "conditioned arising" and the ground of "nirvana." For Stephen, conditioned arising refers to the "animating principle of life," the very fact of the impermanence of the world. Nirvana refers to those instances in which we are no longer under the sway of toxic states of mind such as greed and hatred. Through seeing this twofold ground, the buddha experienced a radical "shift in perspective" from being attached to narratives and identities to living freely, with care. However, this two-fold ground, which is the "foundation for a life lived with care," is a principle. How to translate this principle into a practice, into a way of life? The practice following from this principle is generally known as the Four Noble Truths. Stephen here, however, speaks of a fourfold task. This fourfold task represents the buddha's suggestion for how to live from our "ground" with care. The task involves first, "comprehending suffering," second, "letting go of the arising," third, "beholding the ceasing," and finally, "cultivating the path." In essence, the fourfold task is a recognition of our innate tendency toward "reactivity" and a prescription to instead, cultivate an appropriate "response." When we respond rather than react to life, we are more apt to live with care and thus, to cherish and protect our world. For Series description and Teacher BIOs, please visit Part 1. To access the entire series, please click on the link below: A Culture of Awakening: All 18 Parts