Zen Mind

Where are you located in your body? Most of us, without ever having chosen it, sense ourselves somewhere behind the eyes. Zazen instructions typically bundle two separable practices: disidentifying from thinking, and relocating the self in the belly. Contemporary mindfulness often teaches the first and omits the second. Zen's own instruction is to sit as a buddha rather than in order to become one, trusting a monastic container to do that work silently; outside such a container, this talk suggests, it has to be made explicit. To that end it explores a Daoist qigong exercise, “Sun Ding Fut,” translated as “Sitting Like a Buddha.” While disidentifying from thoughts, the practitioner draws down (inhales) the experiential quality of each sense field to the belly, so that a sense impression isn't just perceived but also felt. After the new locus is built in this way, the final instruction is to release it and sit with an undivided mind. Freedom is always freedom from something: releasing a belly locus is not the same as releasing a head locus, and neither means never having a center, only not occupying one compulsively.
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 You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives.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/
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.

One week after the Open Sky weekend, this talk was given at the Boulder Zen Center and turns that earlier study of the senses toward a question asked after morning meditation: How do we live well? Two answers our culture commonly offers are laid out and found wanting. "Following the rules" leaves you permanently behind an internal "should" you can never satisfy, and "following your own desires" rests on an inner authority that turns out to be hard to locate. Against both, the talk sets what Zen calls "responding to the situation," and tests it on something ordinary: driving. Nobody on the highway drives the speed limit, and moving with the flow of traffic is neither following the rules nor following your desires. It is a case of letting the situation rather than the self set the terms. Continuing the study of mind begun in the first two parts of this series, the talk then asks why this is so hard to do. The mind takes behavior and, through repetition, hardens it into identity, so that following the rules makes you a law-abiding citizen and breaking them makes you a rebel, and neither is free. But identity is less fixed than we typically think. It is like a landscape shaped by the water running through it. How can we transform it? The talk highlights the importance of patience and steadiness. Rather than will, it is the continuous exposure to teaching and community that does the gradual work of reshaping the ground we act from.
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, Uji – Being-Time, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available for purchase! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.
The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course
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.

Given outdoors during our recent Open Sky Practice, this talk takes up the Yogācāra teaching of the eight consciousnesses, which splits mind into three to address self, continuity, and karma. (1) Mano, the conceptual consciousness, binds the physical senses into objects and names them. (2) Alaya, the “storehouse consciousness”—maybe better called a “greenhouse” because it is changing from moment to moment—holds not content but dispositional seeds, like the weights of a neural network that every experience alters; so everything matters, since each act reconditions the overall dispositions. (3) Manas appropriates all of this as self. Meditation starves manas of content to appropriate: shift from thinking to breath and a gap opens where everything still functions, unowned. The talk then names how the structure of mind can be transformed. The Yogācāra school calls it the “turning around of the base,” in which alaya becomes the great mirror wisdom that reflects without grasping, manas the wisdom of equality (the falling away of the self/other distinction), mano the wisdom of discernment (there can be discernment without grasping), and the senses the wisdom of accomplishing what is needed (what the Zen tradition calls appropriate response). Finally, the talk reflects on sudden and gradual awakening: conditioning shifts gradually, while the sense of self can fall away in a moment.
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, Uji – Being-Time, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available for purchase! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.
The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course
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.

Given outdoors during our recent Open Sky Practice, this talk takes up the Buddhist approach to the senses. Where we usually count five, Buddhism counts six, treating mind as a sense alongside seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, and touch, and understanding each as a field that arises when a sense organ meets its object. The visual field we take for reality is itself the seeing mind; what appears belongs neither to the world outside nor to the self within; it simply arises, relationally. The body too is a sense organ, with a distinction between the skin feeling what touches it and the body sensing itself. What cannot be externalized, bodily sensation or thought, we tend to take as self; the work is to notice that appropriation and loosen it, letting thoughts and body sensations pass like clouds. From this come three practices: (1) move through the sense fields one at a time, letting each be its own world, then let them dissolve into the seemingly seamless field that holds them all; (2) within each sense, notice the distinction between focus and field, the object attended to and the open ground from which it arises, as sound arises from silence; and (3) notice that the senses are surrounded by mystery, that there is always more than they can perceive.
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, Uji – Being-Time, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available for purchase! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.
The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi.
Receive 30% off through July 24 with the code UJI30. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course
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.

Zen is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Daoism. But which way around: is it a Buddhism with a Daoist inflection, or a Daoism reinventing itself through a Buddhist lens? The question is practical. Zen can be sparse on how zazen translates into everyday life, as if appropriate action would simply fall into place once we sit hard enough. The Daoist stories have more to say. In the Zhuangzi, a cook's blade stays sharp for nineteen years because it follows the inherent structure of the ox; a swimmer navigates the white-water torrent with ease, following the course of the water without making a private one of his own. Appropriate action depends on a mind that perceives the patterns of a situation—its structure as well as its dynamic. There is much to be learned from the Daoist views on how the skill of discerning and acting in accord with these patterns can be cultivated.
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/
We're pleased to announce that Uji – Being-Time, a new self-paced course taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.
The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi.
Receive 30% off through July 24 with the code UJI30. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course
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.