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Zen (Chan)

 The meditation (dhyana) school originating in China that emphasizes "mind-to-mind transmission"
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    Ambivalent Zen Paid Member

    By Lawrence Shainberg
    Roshi wears his Yankee cap to breakfast, doesn’t remove it even after we sit down. He has a large collection of hats, but he has worn this one exclusively since I bought it for him last week at Yankee Stadium. Slightly self-conscious about his shaved head, he never goes out without a hat, but the Yankee cap has the added advantage of making him look, if not like an American, at least at home in the culture. Like any Zen master, he aims to walk the streets as if invisible, attract no attention, leave no trace of himself in anyone’s mind. The robes he wears in the zendo are seldom worn outside it. He favors flannel shirts and khaki pants, Saucony running shoes, a Yankee jacket in the fall and, when the weather turns, a parka and a black woolen watch cap purchased through the L. L. Bean catalogue. In addition to hats, he collects watches and seems to wear a different one every day. More »
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    Raven's Edge Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    IN MEDITATION PRACTICE, as in the garden, often the best learning happens at the edge of what you know, where the sorceress hills at the back of your brain go stone dark and you push through onto new ground. “Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite beyond it,” observed the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson of the garden. This is the landscape I happened upon this winter, standing in the last Green Gulch field before the ocean, when a flock of ravens dismantled my notion of what it takes to make a garden. More »
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    Being Intimate with Demons Paid Member

    By Jane Hirshfield
    At Tassajara, the Soto Zen monastery inland from Big Sur, where I lived for three years in the mid-seventies, a stone Buddha of great beauty and concentration sits on an altar. From his lotus throne he radiates both serenity and acceptance, the traditional half-smile on his face greeting whatever is brought into the room. In many ways, I found such a reminder of one’s own Buddha-nature quite helpful. Without such equanimity, how could one sit without moving amid the many hours of thoughts, feelings, memories, physical pain, or even the joys, that are an inevitable part of Zen practice? More »
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    Interbeing with Thich Nhat Hanh Paid Member

    Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh was born in central Vietnam in October 1926 and became a monk at the age of sixteen. During the Vietnam War, he left his monastery and became actively engaged in helping victims of the war and publicly advocating peace. In 1966, he toured the United States at the invitation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation "to describe the aspirations and the agony of the voiceless masses of the Vietnamese people." As a result, he was threatened with arrest in Vietnam and unable to return. He served as the chairman of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation during the war and in 1967 was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. More »
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    Kokopelli's Sack Paid Member

    By Wendy Johnson
    For the late-season gardener there is no escape from the great ripening of August. The hands of every gardener are stained tell-tale brown with the gummy residue of unruly Ailsa Craig tomato plants. Try as we may to find a place of repose away from the incessant chatter of the cockscomb plants gossiping with the whirligig zinnias, nothing works. The tendrils of the lemon cucumber push open the stoutest sanctuary door, creep over the threshold, and wind clockwise around the gardener’s wrist. Once, twice, and again . . . the servant is pulled back to the garden. More »
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    Face-to-face with Natalie Goldberg Paid Member

    Natalie Goldberg is a writer and writing teacher living in Taos, New Mexico. Her books include the best-selling  Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within (Shambhala Publications) and its sequel, Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life (Bantam). Her most recent book, Long Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America (Bantam), is an autobiographical work featuring reminiscences of her experiences with Dainin Katagiri Roshi (abbot of Minnesota Zen Center), her first Zen teacher. Katagiri Roshi came to the United States from Japan to help Shunryu Suzuki Roshi at San Francisco Zen Center and later went on to found his center in Minneapolis. A collection of his dharma talks, Returning to Silence, is available from Shambhala Publications. More »