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.
Platform Sutra
All the sutras and texts, all twelve divisions of the Hinayana and Mahayana canons, were arranged by people. And it was because of the nature of wisdom that they could do so. Moreover, if there were no people in the world, none of the ten thousand teachings would have appeared.
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Eight Means to Enlightenment
All the various past Buddhas were enlightened beings. Their great enlightenment is attributed to their having mastered the eight means to nirvana as human beings. These eight means were clarified by the Buddha Shakyamuni himself in his final teaching before he entered parinirvana.
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The Formless Precepts
Good friends, while I confer on you the Formless Precepts, you must all experience this for yourselves. Recite this together with me, and it will enable you to see the three-bodied buddha within you.
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Treasury of Light – Part 2
The great master Yunmen, thirty-ninth generation from the Buddha, said to a group in a lecture, “All people have a light, but when they look at it, they do not see it, so it is obscure. What is everyone’s light?” No one replied, so the master himself said on their behalf, “The communal hall, the Buddha shrine, the kitchen pantry, the mountain gate.”
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Full Awareness of Breathing – Anapanasati Sutta
O bhikkus, the method of being fully aware of breathing, if developed and practiced continuously, will have great rewards and bring great advantages. It will lead to success in practicing the Four Establishments of Mindfulness. If the method of the Four Establishments of Mindfulness is developed and practiced continuously, it will lead to success in the practice of the Seven Factors of Awakening.
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Discourse 18 Lin-Chi
Nowadays, one who studies Buddhadharma must seek true insight. Gaining true insight, you are not affected by birth-and-death, but freely can go or stay. You need not seek that which is excellent—that which is excellent will come of itself.
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Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta – The First Sermon at Benares
There are these two extremes that are not to be indulged in by one who has gone forth. Which two? That which is devoted to sensual pleasure with reference to sensual objects: base, vulgar, common, ignoble, unprofitable; and that which is devoted to self-affliction: painful, ignoble, unprofitable. Avoiding both of these extremes, the Middle Way, realized by the Tathagata
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The Stages of Meditation
We should awaken the wisdom that comes from meditation so as to directly experience reality ourselves. All the teachings emphasize that even by much study and much consideration one cannot experience reality directly.
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Platform Sutra – Part 1
I have come here today because I have a connection of many lifetimes with you officials, clerics, and laypeople. 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.
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Sermon of Zen Master Bassui
This mind is originally pure: when the body is born, it shows no sign of birth; and when the body dies, it has no sign of death. Neither is it marked as male or female, nor has it any form, good or bad. Because no simile can reach it, it is called enlightened nature, or Buddha nature.
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Breakthrough Sermon
The mind is the root from which all things grow. If you can understand the mind, everything else is included. It’s like with a tree. All of its fruit and flowers, its branches and leaves, depend on its root. If you nourish its root, a tree multiplies. If you cut its root, it dies.
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Secrets of Cultivating the Mind
Even though there is a difference between whether one strays from it or realizes it, nevertheless the basic source is one. That is why it is said that the Dharma refers to the minds of living beings. This open, silent mind is not more in sages or less in ordinary people.
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Inner Constancy
Those who “maintain unified-mindfulness without deviation” use the eye which is empty and pure to fix the mind on seeing one thing constantly day and night without interruption, exclusively and zealously without moving.
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Plum Blossoms
This old plum tree is boundless. All at once its blossoms open, and of itself the fruit is born.
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Sitting Meditation
Many are those who have seen but can do nothing about it. Once you have seen, why can’t you do anything about it? Just because of not discerning; that is why you are helpless. If you see and discern, then you can do something about it.
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Treatise on Sitting Meditation – Part 2
It takes incalculable eons to attain buddhahood by accumulating virtue and good qualities, but if you practice the way of unity of cause and effect, you realize buddhahood in one lifetime.
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West Evening Mountain Talk – Part 4
The monk asked, “Zen masters these days give a koan to their disciples. This makes students study words, doesn’t it?” The Master answered, “No, it doesn’t. Yuan-wu said, ‘Students who have just started Zen practice have no idea about it. So out of compassion, the masters give them a koan as a signpost, so that the disciples can devote themselves to discovering oneness, dispelling random illusions, and to realizing finally that Original Mind is not something that comes from outside.
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Ten Guidlines for the Ch’an School
Many people in modern times disregard this. They may join Ch’an groups, but they are lazy about Ch’an study. Even if they achieve concentration, they do not choose real teachers. Through the errors of false teachers, they likewise lose the way.
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Guidelines for Studying the Way
Practicing Zen, studying the way, is the great matter of a lifetime. You should not belittle it or be hasty with it.
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The Meditations of a Bodhisattva – Part 2
Once the mind is made one-pointed and more supple, using different meditative objects, the bodhisattva attains what are called formless meditations.
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The Meditations of a Bodhisattva
One who wishes to gain omniscience swiftly must strive in three things: in compassion, in the thought of enlightenment, and in meditation. Practice compassion from the very outset, for we know that compassion alone is the foundation of all the qualities of Buddhahood.
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Wake-up Sermon – Part 2
Seen with true vision, form isn’t simply form because form depends on mind. And mind isn’t simply mind, because mind depends on form. Mind and form create and negate each other. That which exists, exists in relation to that which doesn’t exist. And that which doesn’t exist doesn’t exist in relation to that which exists.
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Since I Became a Buddha – Part 1
We tend to think that is 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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Awakening
When I was a young person, at the beginning of my life, I looked at nature and saw that all things are subject to decay and death and thus to sorrow.
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West Mountain Evening Talk – Part 3
The Master said, “Bukko Zenji’s advice to his disciple Bukkoku goes: ‘I doubt that many students in Japan will attain satori in their lifetimes. Some students in this country tend to admire intellectual understanding instead of trying to attain satori.
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