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 2025!
Join us on this journey as Daily Zen evolves and grows into the present moment, heading into our 25th year.
The Teishos are also available wherever you get your podcasts.
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?
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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.
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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.
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What is Zen?
Zen is discipline in enlightenment. Enlightenment means emancipation. And emancipation is no less than freedom.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Since I Became Buddha – Part 4
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?”
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Since I became Buddha – Part 3
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?
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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. Read while listening to the Journal
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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
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No Such Thing as Enlightenment
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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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