PZI Events Calendar
W E L C O M E to the PZI Events Calendar! Here you will find all upcoming events and registration links for PZI Zen Online retreats, sesshins, and weekly meditations & talks. Search by individual event, day, or month. Save to your Google Calendar or iCal Calendar. No experience required to participate. All event times are Pacific Time. Questions? Contact Lucas at PZI Support.
F E A T U R E D
April 26: What Is This Light That Everybody Has? – Deep Sit Sunday Zen with John Tarrant & Tess Beasley
May 7–10: Say A True Word & I Will Stay The Night – Open Mind Retreat with John Tarrant, Tess Beasley, & Allison Atwill
June 8–14: Dragons & Tigers, Oh My! – Our Great Summer Sesshin with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers
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MONDAY ZEN with Jon Joseph: It’s Complicated: Odysseus Returns Home
REGISTER
Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered on the sea … Now goddess, child of Zeus,
tell the old story of our modern times.
From the beginning.
—The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
So opens the nearly three-thousand-year-old Greek epic about a man trying to return to his original home. This tale is not very different from our own wandering in the Chan-Zen tradition. Perhaps it is wholly the same.
Dizang asks Fayan, “Where are you going?
Lost, Fayan responds, “I am wandering, trying to get back to my true home.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I am not at all sure,” replies Fayan.
“Being lost, being unsure, that itself is your original home,” answers Dizang.
When The Odyssey opens, our hero—sacker of cities, trickster, beggar, pirate, loving husband and father—is being held captive by the alluring and powerful nymph Calypso, who wishes to keep him as her lover for all eternity. Instead, forlorn, he sits all day long on the shore of her island, weeping for the family and community he has not seen in two decades. Rather than the immortality of the gods that she is offering, he wishes instead to once again “see the smoke that rises/from his own homeland, and he wants to die.”
Emily Wilson’s translation of the classic is “majestic as literature gets,” writes one critic. She brings forth the light of this one hero’s journey that shines through all ages, regions and cultures. It radiates with the nature, which is our self nature. There is an immediacy, intimacy and familiarity in both the story and the translation that allows us to embody the journey and know it to be our own.
Tell me about a complicated man and woman, who have wandered and have been lost, who have done both wonderful and awful things, and who now just wish to return home to their hearths and families. Tell me, Muse, an old story of our modern times.
—Jon Joseph
COME JOIN US on Mondays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation. Register to participate. All are welcome.
Jon Joseph Roshi, Director of San Mateo Zen Community
