Teisho Today Archives
Welcome to the Teisho Today archives where we present our most recent Daily Zen Journals as audio files for your enjoyment. Over time we aim to have the entire library of journals available in this format, however, this is a work in progress as the first journal was released in 1998, and this is now 2022!
Join us on this journey as Daily Zen evolves and grows into the present moment heading into our 25th year.
West Evening Mountain Talk – Part 6
‘The truth can be attained neither by words or by silence.’ The Patriarchs and the descendants of Bodhidharma are not supposed to rely on words and letters. Is that supposed to mean that silence is to be preferred and words are to be avoided? On the contrary, the one thing they want is for students to see that the real truth lies neither in words nor in silence.
Reaching the Fundamental Ground
Since the fundamental ground is neither a feature of the world nor a transmundane phenomenon, many people who want to practice Zen wonder how it can be reached. This question itself, however, indicates a failure to digest the implications of the term fundamental.
Mind is the One Vehicle
Are ordinary and sage different or not? There is no difference at all. With awakening, the person who is ordinary in the morning is a sage by evening. Without awakening, you are subject to birth in the six planes of existence.
Great Enlightenment – Part 2
“Throughout history, all the woodcutters in the mountains and fishermen in the seas have had enlightenment.” If students study Rinzai’s words they will not be wasting their time. However, we should also study the teachings of other Patriarchs.
Selections from the Diamond Sutra
Those who aspire to the consummation of incomparable enlightenment should recognize and understand all varieties of things in the same way and cut off the arising of views that are mere aspects. As regards aspects, the Tathagata declares that in reality, they are not such. They are merely called “aspects.”
Sermon of Zen Master Bassui – Part 2
Now, then, when you look for what is the host, the master who is now seeing colors, hearing sounds, raising hands and moving feet, though you realize all this is the doing of your own mind, actually you don’t know what its inner reality is. If you say it is nonexistent, it is clear that it is free to act; if you say it exists, its form cannot be seen.
Walking the Middle Path
The Sutra on the Middle Way has profound and wonderful meaning. But only when we discover how to apply the teachings in it to our daily lives can they be truly beneficial. Even when we are able to talk eloquently about the Middle Way, no-self, or Dependent Co-arising, we still need to ask: How can these teachings be put into practice every day?
Source-Ancestral Discourses
I often wander these coastal mountains with friends, monks, and masters of the Way. Karmic transformations brought us together here, mind and spirit, searching for the insight beyond words that understands the Way.
Everyone Instantly Becomes a Buddha
Many Chan practitioners ask questions about the Dharma. The Dharma that is spoken is originally not the true Dharma. As soon as you try to explain things, the true meaning is lost. If you realize that this Mind is originally the Buddha, then at that very instant there is nothing more to do.
Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching
You should each believe your own mind is Buddha. This mind itself is Buddha. The great teacher Bodhidharma came to China from South India, transmitting the supreme vehicle’s teaching of one mind, to get you to wake up.
Tsung Ching Record of Hui Hai – Part 3
Once our Master took his place in the assembly hall and said, “It is far better for all of you to be unconcerned people. Why all this craze for karmic activities…toiling and moiling the whole day through, telling people you are practicing Ch’an and studying the Way, holding forth about your understanding of the Buddha-dharma? This sort of thing is no use at all.
Mind is Formless
You people seek to measure all within the void, foot by foot and inch by inch; I repeat to you that all phenomena are devoid of distinctions of form.
Huang Po – Questions and Answers
All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old.
Dharma Talks – Part 2
Dull-witted as I am, I think if I put my mind to it, I could probably remember a couple of anecdotes to tell people. But that would be like feeding them poison. I don’t want to do that.
Discourse of Master Po Shan – Part 2
In ancient times people could enter Dhyana while tilling the land, picking peaches or doing anything. It was never a matter of sitting idly for prolonged periods, engaged in forcefully suppressing one’s thoughts.
The Basis of Awareness
Expand enlightenment, and the mind is always calm; go along with things, and consciousness runs at a gallop.
On the Transmission of Mind – Part 4
People are often hindered by environmental phenomena from perceiving Mind, and by individual events from perceiving principles; so they often try to escape from environmental phenomena in order to still their minds, or to obscure events in order to retain their grasp on principles.
Selections from the Song of Awakening – Part 2
What then is this transparent jewel whose breadth, height, and depth are without limit, within which the past, the present, and the future transpire?
One Practice Samahdi – Part 2
Deluded people are unaware, so they turn things upside down with their attachments. There are hundreds of such people who teach the Way like this. But they are, you should know, greatly mistaken.
Bodhidarma’s Bloodstream Sermon – Part 2
To find a buddha, all you have to do is see your nature. Your nature is buddha. And the buddha is the person who’s free, free of plans, free of cares.
Essentials for Cultivating the Mind – Part 3
One who comprehends the mind that is the source of all dharmas always understands everything.
On Gardens and The Way
A passage about gardens and how they can connect us with our practice
Guidelines for Studying the Way
Fearing the swift passage of sunlight, practice the Way as though saving your head from fire.
Always Mindful
Whether deep in the mountain valleys or in the bustling villages and towns, they never turned their back on being mindful for an instant.
Dreaming Asleep and Awake
Sincere and rigorous practice lets us calm both body and mind, which in turn allows us, day by day, to reduce our karmic obstructions.
Other Ways to Do Zen
Though sitting in the upright position is the very best way to perfect your body, there are innumerable occasions when you must get bodily involved in the things and conditions of the worldly.
Opening the Hand of Thought – Part 2
The feeling of opening one’s hand is a manifestation of non attachment.
Stillness in Action
While Takashina Rōsen’s piece sounds so simple, it embodies a deep principle of practice. And one that is easy for everyone to relate to.
Buddhism is Natural Truth
There seems to be as many descriptions of Buddhism as there are teachers and schools; each represents a different way of interpreting the essential teachings of Buddha.
Advice and Encouragement
With the change in colors and the sense of pause before the next step in the natural world, what better time than now to recharge our practice?
Discourse of Master Han Shan – Part 2
Such simplicity and clarity breaks through our tendency to complicate practice, something we all have done and still do at times.
Absorption in the Treasury of Light
Unless you form an alliance with the family of Buddhas lifetime after lifetime, how can you grasp what you hear in a lecture like this? Make sure that you do not become further estranged and further remote from it.
What is Zen?
Zen is discipline in enlightenment. Enlightenment means emancipation. And emancipation is no less than freedom.
Treatise on the True Sudden Enlightenment School – Part 3
The Great Path is fused with Mind, revealing the true pattern of reality. All worthy sages past and future tend toward this gate. For those who awaken, the triple world is only mind. Those who do not awaken create dreams as they sleep.
Wake-up Sermon – Part 4
Without the mind there’s no buddha means that the buddha comes from the mind. The mind gives birth to the buddha. But while the buddha comes from the mind, the mind doesn’t come from the buddha.
The Practice of True Reality – Part 2
The practice of true reality is simply to sit serenely in silent introspection. When you have fathomed this you cannot be turned around by external causes and conditions
Joyously Alive
The essential requirement in studying Zen is concentrated focus. You don’t engage in any forced actions; you just keep to the Fundamental. Right where you stand, you must pass through to freedom.
Sayings and Dialogues
The mind of a Wayfarer is plain and direct, without artificiality. There is no rejection and no attachment, no deceptive wandering mind. At all times seeing and hearing are normal. There are no further details.
Since I Became Buddha – Part 2
Some people misunderstand the implications of this. They think, “What a wonderful law. We all live in paradise, and we’re all Buddha. So there’s nothing to do. We don’t have to study, or work, or make progress. We can do anything we want, can’t we?”
Since I became Buddha – Part 1
We tend to think that it has only been 2,500 years or so since the historical Buddha became enlightened, taught, and entered nirvana. So how could he have said at the time after his enlightenment that it had already been an incomprehensible period since he had been enlightened?
The Sermon of No Words
Whether we call what we do Zen practice or Buddhism or Humanism or any other ism, the higher vision of what we can be here is to walk our talk. This action-from-stillness way of life is what we live each day in our actions.
Mind of Enlightenment, Great Compassion, and Skillful Means
The path that all the buddhas teach is the same and is of a single universal taste. It is totally free from all differentiation like empty space and is the ground of all things like the great earth.
Hakuin’s Song of Meditation
In the original, the Song of Meditation is written in very easy language. Before Hakuin, Zen in Japan had not quite given up its Chinese flavor, but with him it became completely Japanese.
Silent Illumination – Part 1
The style of meditation called Silent Illumination is one of the greatest practices of the Chan (Zen) tradition. Originating around the eleventh century, its greatest advocate was Master Hongzhi Zhengjue of the Caodong sect.
The Empty Bowl Sutra
Once when the Bhagavan was dwelling near Sravasti in the Anapindada Garden of the Jeta Forest and expounding the Dharma to the assembly, Manjushri Bodhisattva put on his robe at dawn, picked up his bowl, and proceeded slowly toward the city.
Cultivation and Worldly Activities
For farmers the growing of crops is kufu; for carpenters and plasterers the construction of buildings is kufu. Drawing on this secular meaning, the word came to indicate cultivation of the Buddhadharma for seekers of the Way.
Wisdom and Ignorance
In the evening Rahula finished his meditation practice, went to the Buddha and asked, “O World-Honored One, how should one master mindful breathing, and what great benefit is there?”
Return to Spring
If you’re willing to climb, to let go of each springtime as it arises and recedes below, you can enter into that alluring freshness of new grasses and radiant wildflowers again and again until you finally reach the glaciers, the frozen fields where yesterday’s snows and tomorrow’s will soon meet and blend
No Such Thing as Enlightnement
A monk who had come from Sendai in Oshu said, “Somewhere I seem to recall there being the expression, ‘The mind enslaved to physical form.’ I’m anxious to accord with original mind at all times, but how should I practice in order to do this? Please instruct me.”
Admonitions
As long as you are subject to a life bound by force of habit, you are not free from the burden of the body. The physical being given you by your parents has come into existence through the interdependence of many conditions; while the basic elements thus sustain you, they are always at odds with one another.
The Bright, Boundless Field
The field of boundless emptiness is what exists from the very beginning. You must purify, cure, grind down, or brush away all the tendencies you have fabricated into apparent habits.
Zen and the Art of Tea
What is common to Zen and the art of tea is the constant attempt both make at simplification. The elimination of the unnecessary is achieved by Zen in its intuitive grasp of final reality; by the art of tea, in the way of living typified by serving tea in the tearoom. The art of tea is the aestheticism of primitive simplicity.
Bhaddekaratta Sutta
When we are masters of ourselves, we can grasp the situation as it is, and we’re in the best position to handle whatever may arise. When we dwell in mindfulness day and night, then we are truly practicing “the better way to live alone.”
Cat and Mouse
If you have climbed a mountain, you know that sometimes it goes smoothly, while at other times it is difficult. Meditation is like that. Sometimes things go well, but other times you have negative physical and mental reactions.
Understanding Impermanence
When I was young, it seemed forever between birthdays; now each year flies quickly by. I turn around and twenty years are gone! From the perspective of cosmic time, a life is shorter than the blink of an eye.
Sermon in Tavatimsa Heaven
The World-Honored One said to queen mother, “Queen mother, the reasons why people cannot free themselves from illusion are greed, anger, and ignorance. Because of these three poisons, they cannot even be reborn in the heavens. How much less when they attempt to leave the realm of birth and death!”
About This Mind
About this mind—in truth there is nothing really wrong with it. It is intrinsically pure. Within itself it’s already peaceful. If the mind is not peaceful these days, it’s because it follows moods. The real mind doesn’t have anything to it; it is simply an aspect of nature. It becomes peaceful or agitated because moods deceive it.
Questions of Bodhisattva Mahamati – Not a Word Uttered
The Bodhisattva Mahamati asked the Buddha to teach him the way of practice of the sages and those who follow the way of the One Vehicle.
How to be a Householder Bodhisattva
This affair is a matter of people of sharp faculties and superior wisdom who do not consider it difficult to understand a thousand when hearing one. It requires a stand that is solid and true and faith that is thoroughgoing.
The Hoshin-ji Sermons
What I teach everyone in these talks of mine is the unborn Buddha-mind of illuminative wisdom, nothing else. Everyone is endowed with this Buddha-mind, only they don’t know it. My reason for coming and speaking to you like this is to make it known to you.
Shodoka – Song of Awakening
True reality is the essence and the original source, while divine powers are merits. We like the merits and dislike the essence. We love to receive a salary, we don’t love the work; we love the reward, we don’t love the effort.
The Time Being
Even though you do not measure the hours of the day as long or short, far or near, you still call it twelve hours. Because the signs of time’s coming and going are obvious, people do not doubt it. Although they do not doubt it, they do not understand it.
Wake-up Sermon – Part 3
When the mind reaches nirvana, you don’t see nirvana. Because the mind is nirvana. If you see nirvana somewhere outside the mind, you’re deluding yourself.
One Practice Samadhi
This teaching has been passed down by the ancients. It isn’t something I discovered by myself. But if you wish to hear this teaching of the ancients, you must listen with pure minds. And if you wish to get rid of your delusions, you should understand it as past generations have.
Great Vow
The Great Vow is setting up and defining the goal. Without a goal, we may go in circles or backward. But if we have a view of the proper goal, whether we travel fast or slow, eventually we reach our destination.
Kalama Sutra
Kalamas, whenever you yourselves know that these things are unwholesome; these things are harmful; these things are criticized by the wise; and when practiced according to their own standard, these things bring suffering and have no benefit, then you ought to abandon such things.
The Mind Dharma
According to the Ch’an method, self-cultivation begins with the control of mind as the starting point. By mind is meant the wandering mind, always in search of something in the realm of unreality.
Great Doubt
In Zen practice, the essential point is to rouse doubt. What is this doubt? When you are born, for example, where do you come from? You cannot help but remain in doubt about this. When you die, where do you go? Again, you cannot help but remain in doubt.
Harmony – Part 3
Now we must talk about what to do while sitting in Zen meditation. The same three things must be attended to. In one sitting, whether the time is long or short, i.e., within a twelve-hour period whether it lasts for one, two, or three hours, when using one’s heart-mind to regulate thoughts, one must know well during this time whether or not to harmonize body, breath, and heart.
Harmony – Part 2
The second step when entering Zen meditation is to regulate the breathing. In doing so there are four ways to breathe, i.e., the breath sounds like wind blowing, sighing, Qi flowing, and quiet breathing. The first three are not appropriate for adjusting your breath, while the last one does help regulate it.
Harmony – Part 1
The word harmony is used here in the sense of harmonizing the five Dharma activities. The first is to regulate the times of eating and drinking. The second one is to regulate sleeping, the third is to regulate the body, the fourth is to regulate breathing, and the fifth is to regulate the heart-mind.
Zazenron
The main point of zazen is supposed to be that no thought arises. But if we check thought by thought, surely it is like washing off blood with blood.
Following the Breath with Mindfulness
It is essential that we understand this profound truth: the prana-body is the conditioner of the flesh-body. We ought to know that there are these two kaya (bodies), or levels of kaya.
All Beings Are in the Process of Becoming Buddhas
“All beings are intrinsically Buddha,” as Hakuin said, means that all sentient beings are endowed with the wisdom and virtuous power of the Buddha and are, without exception, gradually advancing along the path of liberation. It is inevitable that all human beings will perfectly realize their essential nature.
The Lankavatara Sutra
Bodhisattvas should become adept at examining the two kinds of phenomena that have no self. And what are the two kinds of phenomena that have no self? Neither beings nor dharmas have a self.
Fundamental Principles
Let us investigate the fundamental principles of Dhamma, Natural Truth. I would like to discuss these essential points of Buddhism in the hope that a grasp of them will help you advance in your studies and training.
Discourses of Master Po Shan – Part 1
When working at Zen, the important thing is to generate the i ching (doubt sensation). What is this doubt sensation? For instance: Where did I come from before my birth, and where shall I go after my death?
Correct Practice
There are two kinds of Zen meditation: sitting practice, and, depending on circumstances, practicing samatha-vipasyana while doing other activities. The first way for those who desire to perfect samatha-vipasyana meditation is done while sitting.
The Sermon of No Words
The sermon of words and phrases is the finger pointing to the moon, the fist knocking at the door. The object is to see the moon, not the finger, to get the door open and not the knocking itself; so far as these things do achieve their objects they are fine.
True Mind
There are not many arts to Zen study; it just requires knowing your own true mind.
Questions of Bodhisattva Mahamati
The Bodhisattva Mahamati requested the Buddha’s instructions on the way to cultivate the path of the bodhisattva. The Buddha answered, “Mahamati, the bodhisattva cultivates the path by practicing the four ways. “The first is to see that all that exists appears from the mind. The three realms of existence cannot exist independent of the mind.
Handbook for Zen Students – Part 2
Although I am not worthy of the task, I am intent on the study of the ancient teachings and consider the sacred writings of the sutras to be a great treasure. But these writings are nonetheless numerous as leaves in thick foliage and the sea of the Tripitaka is vaster than the ocean.
Handbook for Zen Students – Part 1
Those who studied Buddhism in antiquity would not speak as the Buddha had not spoken or act as the Buddha had not acted. Thus they treasured only the sacred literature of the sutras and nothing else. But for those who study Buddhism today, that which they hand on and recite are the writings of officials; that which they seek out and hold onto are the verses of these officials.
Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind – Part 3
One who comprehends the mind that is the source of all dharmas understands everything. If you can stop generating false thoughts and illusions of personal possession and completely discard your preoccupation with the body, then you will certainly achieve birthlessness. How inconceivably wonderful!
Treatise on Contemplating Mindfulness
Huike asked: If there are people intent on seeking the path of Enlightenment, what method should they practice, what method is most essential and concise? Bodhidharma answered: Let them just contemplate mind—this one method takes in all practices and is indeed essential and concise.
Questions from the Lankavatara Sutra
Witnessing the transformation of the habit-energy of self-existence of the repository consciousness, the will, and the conceptual consciousness, this is what is meant by nirvana. The nirvana of other Buddhas and myself is the realm that is empty of self-existence.
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
Practice of Meditation
Ultimately, all true learning is done on one’s own
