Brooklyn Zen Center – Details, episodes & analysis

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

Our audio dharma talks are offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. If you would like to support Brooklyn Zen Center, please visit the “Giving” section of our website.

The Teaching of Thus: the Avatamsaka Sutra as a Root of Zen Practice

As our lives come into being, as we become, we learn about sickness, old age and death. It becomes life, loss, gain, or what we see as gain and loss. And what we do with it, in terms of how we create our own suffering from those changes that happen, from the life that happens.

Zazen is a way I would offer to open to relationality and to open to spaciousness in a full life.

We are afraid to break open, afraid to cry. And that is exactly what my invitation is. Go hear stories, be in community. It’s not just about right and wrong and seing our responsibility. It’s about grief.

We can’t acknowledge impermanence in the world if we can’t acknowledge it in ourselves. And it’s frightening.

Our path is tiptoeing, falling in —sometimes drowning in— our own created fire.

We trip, we fall, and we look to see what did we just trip over. What was the cause of the mistake? We try to learn from what just happened. That is the most important thing. We are not about being perfect. We are about being awake.

Everyone is doing their best, even when we make terrible mistakes. I think that people who do things that are cruel and senseless, the conditioning that they had to endure in order to do those kinds of things is tragic. Not to say that they are not responsible. They are responsible. But there are reasons.