by Mushin Crisman | Apr 10, 2023 | Dharma Discourse
2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama had an experience which changed humankind…he “awakened”. He was henceforth known as “the Buddha”, meaning “the Awakened One”. What does it mean ‘to wake up’? Is it more than a descriptive metaphor of the Buddha’s experience? If you...
by Mushin Crisman | Apr 3, 2023 | Dharma Discourse
Every time we meet as a sangha, we close our practice by chanting the Four Bodhisattva Vows. The first of these is, “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them”. What exactly are sentient beings? What does Zen mean by sentience? The English word sentience...
by Mushin Crisman | Mar 27, 2023 | Dharma Discourse
Zen Buddhism is an ancestral lineage teaching, a teaching transmitted in part by the recorded ‘meeting and speaking’ of Ch’an/Zen practitioners. These dialogues are called mondo, “questions and answers”. Mondo often seem curt, abrupt, even hostile… “Dharma combat”....
by Mushin Crisman | Mar 20, 2023 | Dharma Discourse
In the mid-20th century West there were few opportunities to ‘learn’ meditation from a teacher. There were few books, and fewer teachers. In many places the only meditation teacher available taught “Transcendental Meditation”…TM. Without disparaging TM, it was the...
by Mushin Crisman | Mar 8, 2023 | Dharma Discourse
What comes to mind when you hear or see the word “posture”? Is it a description of a particular conformation of the physical body, a state of mind, a particular attitude, a political stance? In Zen, posture is all these and more. The English the word posture has Latin...
