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Episodes
Weekly public talks recorded live at the Angel City Zen Center
Episodes
Friday May 31, 2019
Friday May 31, 2019
Dave leads the sangha in a special memorial day discussion on Kodo Sawaki’s “Seeing the World from a Casket.” It’s an exploration of who we are when our defining struggles are no longer struggles and the clarity of viewing life from the other side.
Tuesday May 28, 2019
Tuesday May 28, 2019
Emily Eslami on Kakuan Shien's Ten Bulls, or the Ox Herding pictures you may have heard them called. It's a path of no path, the great Zen rodeo, the straight road to enlightenment that turns out to be a spiral, or a circle, or a flat infinite plain? It's hard to say, but Emily leads the group in a great talk on a beautiful illustration of practice. The Ten Bulls are borrowed from our Rinzai siblings, which means there's a refreshing focus on practice with some hint of a progression, deepening, and maturing as we go on. But Emily warns us not to be fooled because that progress and maturing is as like to be happening now in the space of a moment as it is over the course of a lifetime. It's story of learning to ride the great ox, finding your way home, and finding out everywhere you go is home.
Tuesday May 21, 2019
Tuesday May 14, 2019
Friday May 10, 2019
Saturday May 04, 2019
Tuesday Apr 30, 2019
Friday Apr 26, 2019
Tuesday Apr 23, 2019
Monday Apr 08, 2019
Monday Apr 08, 2019
Emma takes a deep look at the necessity of goallessness in practice. Reading from a piece about gaining ideas from Suzuki’s “Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind,” she asks the biggest conundrum in Zen. If there’s no goal, why are we doing this? It’s an encouraging talk of discouragement, a reclamation of the value of reality as its own reward, an exhortation towards an attitude of pure practice. “Do you think the purpose of practice is to become a better person?” she asks. And yet as Suzuki remind us, “When everyone understand the value of pure practice, we will have peace in the world.”