Auckland Zen Centre: Weekly Podcasts

Comments on Master Hongzhi's Cultivating the Empty Field, 1: Biography of Master Hongzhi Main Source(s): Cultivating the Empty Field, The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi, translated by Taigen Daniel Leighton with Yi Wu.

Comments on an interview with leading American poet Ross Gay where he describes how we can cultivate joy, delight and gratitude. Main source(s): https://onbeing.org/programs/ross-gay-tending-joy-and-practicing-delight/

Jukai : why and how we receive the 16 precepts, and do it more than once, plus some notes on understanding the 10 cardinal precepts in the light of the 3 resolutions -- to do no harm, to do good, and to liberate all living beings.

The fourth and last of the pre-Jukai Dharma classes on the Heart Sutra

The third in the series of dharma classes on the Heart Sutra

The second class in the Heart Sutra series.

Sometimes silence, so valued by us as students of Zen, is not enough. Of course all lives matter, but we need to affirm aloud that black and brown lives matter, as they are often devalued, disregarded and outright destroyed. If we are white we need to work at becoming aware of the privileges we enjoy as a result of present and historical colonisation, and the ideology if white superiority that goes along with it.

The first in the series of classes on the Heart Sutra

Bodhicitta (the intelligent heart, or aspiration to awaken for the sake of all) as a way of engaging with this time of great peril and great opportunity.

Some of the ways the pandemic lock-down is being understood and how we might respond to this global upheaval in our own lives.

Dharma Talk by Richard von Sturmer

The Buddha said whoever would tend me should tend the sick. With what attitude should we tend the sick?

Master Wansong comments on this story, "When the ancients were about to go, they frolicked in the realm of old age, sickness and death." How do you frolic in old age, sickness and death? Watch Master Dong Shan play like a dragon with his pearl and learn about the struggle and careful attention that lay behind his great freedom.

What is the nature of illness? What Is medicine? Ummon says that the whole earth is medicine, and asks what, then, is the self? How do things change when we approach the circumstances of our life from an understanding that the whole earth is medicine?

Zen teachings on sickness, death and healing. Quoted text: In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

A panel discussion on zen and marriage with Hogen Green-sensei and his wife Cindy Eiho Green, of the Mountains and Rivers Order and Amala Sensei (Auckland Zen Centre) and her husband Richard v. Sturmer

Coming to the Path talk by Hamish Bartle

How do we deal with frightening things when they confront us, and how do we deal fear itself and the vicious cycles of anxiety? Main Text: The Hidden Lamp, Stories fromTwenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon, Wisdom 2013.

People often come to the Dharma because they want to transcend birth and death, sickness and old age, but masters of the past and present all grow old, get sick and die. How can we leave behind birth and death? Main Text: The Collected Works of Chinul, translated and with an introduction by Robert E. Buswell Jr., University of Hawaii Press, 1983

True Mind is like "a jewel hidden in the mountain of form". It exists but is not perceived. "Ordinary people are those who are enlightened all day long without ever knowing it." Even amid the troubles of the dusty world, the true mind remains unafflicted by those troubles. Main Text: The Collected Works of Chinul, translated and with an introduction by Robert E. Buswell Jr., University of Hawaii Press, 1983