Zen Mind

Given at the Boulder Zen Center as the opening talk of the course Enacting the Four Noble Truths, this talk begins with the formula in which the teaching was handed down: there is suffering, there is a cause, because there is a cause there can be an end, and there is a path. The talk then asks how such a formula becomes alive in experience rather than knowledge to be filed away. It proposes that every tradition has an engine, a core that lets you go anywhere within it; the engine of Buddhism is that there is suffering and there is a way to end it. In the sutra itself, the talk notes, the truths appear as verbs: suffering is to be (1) comprehended, its cause (2) abandoned, its end (3) realized, and the path (4) cultivated. Following Stephen Batchelor's reading of these as four tasks, but setting aside "task" for its sense of an assignment, the talk calls them enactments and renders the first as being intimate with suffering: noticing, now, the friction (a root sense of dukkha) in one's own experience. The talk then warns that practice framed as work defers its payoff indefinitely. It offers instead the garden: tending that is never finished but can be enjoyed while it is done. This is how the talk reads Dogen's practice-realization: we practice not in order to be liberated but to enact liberation moment after moment.
Welcome to Zen Mind!
Our live fall practice course, Enacting the Four Noble Truths, officially began on October 17th. The course explores the Buddha’s first teaching, the Four Noble Truths, through the lens of Zen practice. Together, we’ll look beyond what we think we already understand, exploring each truth not simply as an idea to believe, but as something to embody and practice. Through the traditional teachings, their enactment in daily life, and the surprising perspective of the Heart Sutra, we’ll investigate how practice can bring us into a more intimate relationship with suffering, reactivity, and the possibility of release.
Enrollment closes on October 24 - learn more and register here: https://www.boulderzen.org/four-noble-truths
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given at a Boulder Zen Center One-Day Sitting for young adults in collaboration with Dharma Gates. It starts with the gap between what we expect of meditation and what we actually experience: aches and pains, and thoughts that plan, rehearse, accuse, justify, and compare. Zazen shows how unstable the mind is, and the world, reaching us as a stream of news, is no steadier. We respond by building ground to stand on: a life plan, a profession, a partner, a worldview. They work to a degree, but never as solidly as we hope. The talk then guides an experiment: listen to a sound, then to the silence around it; feel a sensation, then the sensitivity space it appears in; notice a thought, then the gap between thoughts. In each case the surrounding field is relatively stable, while the contents come and go within it. True steadiness comes not from the ground we construct but from the backward step into the field. Three practices follow: (1) notice and know the field, which always already receives everything without effort, (2) notice what pulls you out of it, and (3) return. Most practitioners want to stay in the field; the right effort is simply to keep returning. Imperturbable mind, as Zen calls it, is not a mind that is never disturbed but a mind that is not disturbed by being disturbed.
Welcome to Zen Mind!
Our live fall practice course begins on October 17th! The course explores the Buddha’s first teaching, the Four Noble Truths, through the lens of Zen practice. Together, we’ll look beyond what we think we already understand, exploring each truth not simply as an idea to believe, but as something to embody and practice. Through the traditional teachings, their enactment in daily life, and the surprising perspective of the Heart Sutra, we’ll investigate how practice can bring us into a more intimate relationship with suffering, reactivity, and the possibility of release.
Learn more and register for the live fall practice course: https://www.boulderzen.org/four-noble-truths
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk starts from the common wish for a peaceful place in ourselves that protects us permanently from difficulty. The talk invokes the koan "Dongshan's No Cold or Heat" and reads it as a teaching about our relationship to impermanence: conditions alternate outside our control and we typically meet them with comparison and preference. Our wish to escape into stability is the question religion has answered with two ideas: (1) a better world elsewhere (heaven, nirvana) and (2) a path by which the individual gets there. Against this, the talk sets Nagarjuna's claim that samsara and nirvana have the same boundaries: enlightenment does not change the world; what changes is our activity. Emptiness is read as an activity of emptying, and what is emptied is our grip on things, including the grip on ourselves. Loosening that grip does not dispel the discomfort, but it does free us from suffering. Dongshan's final answer, "when it's cold, be cold through and through," names what this means in practice: letting an experience come rather than trying to get away from it. Picking up a recent episode, "Sitting Like a Buddha," the talk suggests making a stable location in the belly from which to let things come, then releasing even that center into an undivided field: being a self without being a self.
Welcome to Zen Mind!
Our live fall practice course begins on October 17th! The course explores the Buddha’s first teaching, the Four Noble Truths, through the lens of Zen practice. Together, we’ll look beyond what we think we already understand, exploring each truth not simply as an idea to believe, but as something to embody and practice. Through the traditional teachings, their enactment in daily life, and the surprising perspective of the Heart Sutra, we’ll investigate how practice can bring us into a more intimate relationship with suffering, reactivity, and the possibility of release.
Learn more and register for the live fall practice course: https://www.boulderzen.org/four-noble-truths
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

Given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center, this talk picks up a question left open in the previous episode, "Sitting Like a Buddha." If zazen is not a means to awakening but its enactment, what about karma? Thoughts, fragments of story, and small triggers of dissatisfaction keep arriving, and we assume awakening means their absence. The talk proposes instead that we are always sitting and living with our karma; what changes is our relationship to it. Karma means intentional action, and the talk reads intention as a leaning: every action leaves a trace, the trace becomes a disposition, and the disposition leans us toward acting the same way again. Some leanings are inherited, some laid down by our own actions; we are responsible for only the second, yet responsible to both. Like a landscape shaped by the water that has run through it, the present carries the whole past as its shape. Zazen is a posture built to invite all the leanings and complete none of them: a pause that separates leaning from action. When leanings don't automatically translate into action, attention widens from object to field, and the body (with the belly as its cultivated center) becomes an organ for sensing more of the situation. This makes room for an appropriate response to arise from the situation rather than from the self.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

Where are you located in your body? Most of us, without ever having chosen it, sense ourselves somewhere behind the eyes. Zazen instructions typically bundle two separable practices: disidentifying from thinking, and relocating the self in the belly. Contemporary mindfulness often teaches the first and omits the second. Zen's own instruction is to sit as a buddha rather than in order to become one, trusting a monastic container to do that work silently; outside such a container, this talk suggests, it has to be made explicit. To that end it explores a Daoist qigong exercise, “Sun Ding Fut,” translated as “Sitting Like a Buddha.” While disidentifying from thoughts, the practitioner draws down (inhales) the experiential quality of each sense field to the belly, so that a sense impression isn't just perceived but also felt. After the new locus is built in this way, the final instruction is to release it and sit with an undivided mind. Freedom is always freedom from something: releasing a belly locus is not the same as releasing a head locus, and neither means never having a center, only not occupying one compulsively.
Welcome to Zen Mind! 
Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/
If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!
See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at office@boulderzen.org.
Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.