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 Emlyn Guiney
F E A T U R E D
September 8 Sunday Zen: With John Tarrant & Friends
September 21 Daylong: With John Tarrant & Tess Beasley
October 22–27 Fall Sesshin: with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers
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MONDAY ZEN: What Is This Light? with Jon Joseph
February 6, 2023 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm
Free – $10
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Please join us as we share experiences from our recent winter retreat. Our way out of darkness is through opening the heart-mind.
Yunmen taught, “Everybody has a light inside. When you’re looking for it, you can’t see; it’s dark, dark, hidden. What is this light that everybody has?”
He himself answered, “The kitchen pantry, the temple gate.”
Then he said, “It’s better to have nothing than something good.”
—The Blue Cliff Record, Case 86
This morning we completed our winter sesshin, and it is said that while in retreat, every possible emotion will show itself in the course of those six or seven days. That the heart-mind naturally comes forth in all its variations is the very basis of our inquiry work. Last night, before bed, I took my dog out and was nearly in tears at the beauty of the world illuminated by a full moon after a few days of much-needed rain. I composed a poem as I walked:
Blue leash and black dog,
Feet splash puddles of full snow moon.
Broken clouds, adrift.
Yunmen’s koan also allows us to dip into the dark, the shadow. In giving a talk to the retreat group, I spoke of my first Zen teacher, Robert “Senor” King, who spent his early childhood in Manila, the Philippines, during the Japanese occupation in World War II. During this cruel occupation, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos perished. As a child, he contracted poliomyelitis, which disabled his legs for life. Senor King lived most of his life alone. But in an unpublished collection of poems that he left me when he died, he had written a long poem about a brief affair with a young woman twenty years his junior. It reads, in part:
Our loving
flowing, freely gentle,
melting, delighting
our hearts, bodies
remembering! …
It was such a joy for me to read the poem. It may be difficult to always see the light that is inside us. But it is always there, and it never fails us. It is the light that shines in the most common of places: in the kitchen pantry and at the entrance gate. And it is something very good.
Join us for a koan, meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
Register to participate. All are welcome.
—Jon Joseph
