Zen Mind

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 You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives.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.

To be alive is to have problems. While having problems is unpleasant, the deeper difficulty, this talk proposes, is not the problems themselves but the resistance we bring to them. Suffering is not one thing; it is pain multiplied by resistance. Beginning with the Five Remembrances and their reminder that aging, illness, death, and the loss of what we love cannot be escaped, the talk turns to the feelings we least want to feel, taking anxiety and powerlessness as the examples, and asks what it would mean to stop organizing our lives around their avoidance. Zazen offers the training ground: learning, in Suzuki Roshi's phrase, to sit with painful legs without being disturbed by them, then carrying that capacity into the disturbances that arise off the cushion. Reading a section of Being-Time (Uji), where Dogen links change itself, any change, with glorious golden radiance, the talk suggests that our challenge is to find aliveness even within our most unwanted feelings and states of mind. They also belong.
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 now 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.
Special introductory offer: 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.

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.