“We don't have to save everyone, solve everything, or understand the whole mystery of our lives. All we have to do is be in this moment, this breath, this body. Then bow, let go, and listen.”Chodo Sensei shares the story of Kakua, one of the first Japanese monks to travel to China and study Zen. A recluse who preferred remote mountains to monastery fame, Kakua was eventually summoned by the emperor to demonstrate the true teachings he'd acquired. Kakua thought for a moment, reached into the folds of his robe, pulled out a flute, and blew a single note.Then he put the flute away, bowed, and walked out. The emperor was dumbfounded. And that's the whole story.What did Kakua refuse to do? He refused to perform Zen, to make it into something impressive, to assemble a bundle of credentials and understandings to prove himself. He just offered this one complete note. Because the true teaching, Chodo explains, is the understanding that has no words, no thoughts, no ideas. Just whatever is occurring in this moment.Drawing on his years as a hospital chaplain, learning to pause at the door and let the room tell him what was needed rather than entering with too many words, Chodo reflects on how the most compassionate thing we can offer is often not a performance of “being helpful”, but simple presence.And in true Chodo fashion, he ends the talk with a tribute to the life of the great bodhisattva we lost this week, Dolly Parton.

“The robe of liberation does not hide our imperfections. It doesn't erase our history. It's stitched together from many different pieces of cloth, just as our lives are stitched together from moments of joy and grief, cruelty, clarity, confusion, generosity, and fear.”On the final full day of sesshin (silent retreat), Chodo sensei takes up a story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones about Shichiri, a Zen master confronted by a thief wielding a sword. Shichiri gives the man his money, reminds him to leave enough for the next day’s taxes and even asks him to say thank you. Years later, after serving a prison sentence, the thief returns and becomes his disciple.The story raises a profound question: What happens when we refuse to reduce another person (or ourselves) to the worst thing they have ever done?Drawing on his years offering prison dharma at Sing Sing, Chodo reflects on meeting men whom the world had labeled murderer, dealer, rapist, or offender. Zen practice does not erase harm or eliminate accountability, he reminds us. But neither does it allow a single action, wound, or identity to become the whole story of a human life.During sesshin, another kind of thief appears: the voice that says you're not worthy, that steals the present by dragging it into the past, that insists we already know who we are. As practitioners prepare to receive the Buddha's robe, Chodo offers a different understanding. Jukai is about trusting that you have never only been the story you've told yourself. The robe of liberation weaves in every aspect of your being.

“We have to be endlessly humbled and endlessly receptive. And what a joy! That, to me, is the joy of practice: to be endlessly receptive to being changed by whatever kind of ‘meat’ you're getting.”On the 26th day of NYZC’s summer practice period, Koshin sensei turns to a classic story from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones:When Banzan walked through a market, he overheard a customer demand the best piece of meat. The butcher replied, “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”The story ends simply: “At these words Banzan became enlightened.”What would it mean to realize that whatever life is presenting to us right now—in the butcher shop, on the street, or the middle of a difficult relationship—is the best piece? Even what we don’t like. Even what makes us reactive. Even what we’ve been struggling with for fifty years. Can this moment, too, be whole and complete, nothing lacking?Koshin reflects candidly on his own recent experience of rage and impatience in a long-standing relationship. He knows the teaching intellectually, and yet finds himself completely reactive anyway because understanding the dharma in our heads is not the same as living it in our bodies.Practice, he reminds us, is not about eliminating pain or pretending everything feels good. It is about meeting what is here without adding another layer of resistance, judgment, or story. We inquire. We soften. We ask: What is this moment here to teach me?And perhaps, again and again, we discover the strange joy of becoming endlessly receptive to being changed.

Editor's Note(s): Just a few weeks ago, Jisho Siebert, teacher at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa offered the first guest-teacher dharma talk for our summer Commit to Sit. It's an incredibly refreshing take on a classic Zen story which you may have heard a number of times and we are glad to share it with you here. Alongside it, we are very delighted to announce our three Fall courses are now open for registration, the first of which features the guest teacher herself:The Diamond Sutra: Offering Care Without Grasping with Jisho SiebertCatch Your Mind: How to Live in a World on Fire with Koshin SenseiLiving an Ethical Life: A Study of the Zen Precepts with both Koshin Sensei and Chodo SenseiNow, a bit more about Jisho's moving talk...“I found this story really annoying for a long time.”That's how Jisho Siebert opens her exploration of one of Zen's most famous teaching stories, the tale of Master Hakuin, falsely accused of fathering a child, who responds only with “Is that so?” When the truth is revealed a year later and the baby is returned, he says the same three words again.On the surface, it's a story about equanimity. But Jisho invites us to slow down and ask the questions the story leaves out: What was this like for the young woman? For the baby, separated after a year of bonding? For the fish market worker who never came forward? For the parents, the villagers, the storytellers who passed this down, erasing women's perspectives along the way?Drawing on decades of crisis response and violence prevention work, Jisho shows how equanimity in action looks like curiosity instead of judgment, questions instead of arguments, and fierce care that doesn't collapse into either passivity or reactivity.When the whole fabric of a community shifts (as it does for those involved in this classic tale) so does the experience of those within it. There's no one who isn't involved, so how can we act like it?

Editor's Note: In celebration of Commit to Sit starting this week and Chodo sensei's birthday last week, we share his talk from this past Winter Commit to Sit. Enjoy and may it offer some comfort and guidance for you. ‍In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei asks a deceptively simple question: Without a vow, how do you live?Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching on great effort, Chodo explores what a vow actually is while also reflecting on 36 years of sobriety and three decades of Zen practice, both sustained not by certainty but by a simple, sometimes shaky turning. A vow taken one breath, one moment at a time.In our daily practice at NYZC, we can see certain unreachable vows at work. The Bodhisattva vows that we chant: “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them” or “the Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to attain it”. Together we promise to walk, even though it is unlikely we will arrive at any destination. In times of outrage, fear, grief, and numbness, Chodo reminds us that we can return to our vows. Even when we fail, even when we fall short, there is a direction to our lives. With some guidance and help from good spiritual friends, we understand the gap between how we're living and how we aspire to live is our unique (and universal) place of practice.

Editor's Note: In honor of our Commit to Sit practice period starting July 1st and our Wholehearted Sesshin (silent retreat) in August, we share this opening talk from the first night of both our Winter Commit to Sit and our Winter Sesshin in January. May it serve you! In this opening talk, Koshin Sensei invites us to consider how the very places where we suffer can become gateways into deeper intimacy with life. Drawing on the story of a potter who transformed his relationship to fire after being badly burned, Koshin reflects on courage, practice, and the ways we often use suffering to separate ourselves from others rather than meet the world more fully.As the sangha entered a period of study with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s Becoming Yourself (the guiding text for the last Commit to Sit), Koshin reminds us that practice is not a self-improvement project. It is about releasing our fixation on fixing, meeting life directly, and taking responsibility for how we show up in thought, word, and action.Through teachings from Shakyamuni Buddha, Prajnatara, Bodhidharma, Rujing, Dogen, and Suzuki Roshi, this talk points toward a practice of immediacy, intimacy, and rigorous honesty: becoming our true selves for the benefit of all beings, including those who will inherit this practice long after we are gone.

“How you bow is not just for you.” In this recent dharma talk, Koshin Sensei reflects on what it means to practice consistently: to be the same person regardless of who's watching, what conditions you're in, or whether you're getting what you want.Drawing on Dogen Zenji's teaching on the Four Embracing Actions (giving, loving speech, beneficial action, and identity action), Koshin explores what should remain unchangeable in practice and what needs to adapt as NYZC prepares for a major transition.At the core is a distinction borrowed from teacher Aoyama Roshi: Fu'eki, what must not change (the practice of freeing ourselves from small self and habitual mind), and Ryuko, what can evolve to meet the moment.What are the things in your practice and your life that must not change? And what might you need to change in yourself to allow practice to enter you?

“The precept does not ask us to be passive in the face of injustice. The question is always: from what place do we speak?”In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei explores the sixth and seventh precepts: not speaking of others’ faults and errors, and not elevating oneself while blaming others.What can seem like simple teachings become a profound invitation to examine the energy beneath our speech. Are we speaking from compassion, clarity, and care? Or from reactivity, self-protection, and the need to be right?With honesty (and more than a touch of humor), Chodo reflects on how quickly the mind moves toward comparison, judgment, and disparagement, and how this habit creates suffering for ourselves and others. The practice, he reminds us, is not to suppress truth or avoid difficult conversations, but to slow down, look at our motivations, and learn to speak in ways that are true, timely, kind, and beneficial.This is the work of becoming “that which we already are”; people capable of finding the Buddha in one another, especially those who challenge us most. 

“The purpose of practice might be to enter the question so fully that it begins to reshape us.”What is the purpose of practice after all? In this talk on doubt and the practice of not-knowing, Chodo Sensei shares a teaching from his favorite Zen teacher: Zen Master Raven, the wise old bird from Robert Aitken Roshi's animal sangha stories.When Badger asks what the purpose of practice is, Raven doesn't answer directly. Instead, he asks: “Do you have an inkling?” When Badger hesitates and says “I'm not sure,” Raven responds: “Doubts dig up the whole blue planet.”Rather than treating doubt as something to overcome or push away, Chodo invites us to embrace it. Can you live with the doubt? Can you doubt the doubt? Can you feel it in the body rather than trying to answer it from the head? The talk and teaching is about letting doubt do its work of digging, of opening, of uncovering what's been with us all along, waiting for us to stop long enough to feel it.

“In Zen practice, we talk about bearing witness; not as a passive act, but as a form of deep engagement. To really see what's happening. Not escaping into numbness, but also not hardening into fixed views.”In this recent talk, Chodo sensei reflects on the fourth and fifth precepts (truthfulness and not clouding the mind) as practices for living in a fractured and overwhelming world.Speaking to the instability, violence, and uncertainty of our current moment, he invites us to notice the ways we reach for certainty, numbness, outrage, or distraction when the truth feels too much to bear.But what can we do when we are stuck in the “sh*t show” (a term Chodo would never use)? He offers bearing witness as a courageous and compassionate response: staying close to what is true, pausing long enough to discern clearly, and meeting the world without adding confusion to confusion.