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.
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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