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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TUESDAY ZEN with David Weinstein: Xuefeng’s What Is This? —Equanimity 50
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When Xuefeng was living in a hermitage, two monks came to pay their respects. When he saw them coming, Xuefeng thrust open the gate of his hermitage and jumped out, saying, “What is this?”
One of the monks also said, “What is this?”
Xuefeng hung his head and went back inside.
The monks went on to Yantou. Yantou asked, “Where have you come from?”
“From Lingnan,” one monk replied.
“Did you visit Xuefeng?” Yantou asked.
“Yes, we went there.”
“What did he tell you?”
The monk related what happened. Yantou asked, “What did he say after ‘What is this’?”
“He hung his head without a word and went back inside.”
Yantou said, “What a pity! In those days I did not tell him the last words. If I had told him, nobody in the world could deal with him.”
This monk spent the summer season with Yantou, and at the end, he asked what Yantou meant by his observation about Xuefeng.
Yantou asked, “Why didn’t you ask me sooner?”
“It is not so easy to ask you about this.”
“Xuefeng and I were born on the same branch, but we do not die on it.
If you want to know the last words, it is ‘only just this’.”
This feels like a continuation of the previous koan about Dongshan and the teaching he received from his teacher Yunyan, “Just this, this.” Xuefeng was born twenty years after Dongshan and forty years after Yunyan, so it’s easy to assume that the teaching of ‘just this, this’ was circulating around in the Chan world of the time. To experience ‘just this, this’, you must know what ’this’ is. Xuefeng is encouraging the monks, himself and you and I to carry the inquiry further into ‘just this, this’ by engaging the question ‘What is this?’
At the end of Yunmen’s koan about sickness and medicine he asks the question, “What are you?” It’s jarring to think of myself as a ‘what’, somehow more so than asking ‘Who am I’. In a similar way, asking “What is this?” feels like it is asking more of me than “Just this, this”
“What is this?” reading these words. Why is it so hard to ask?
—David Weinstein
COME JOIN US on Tuesdays for koan meditation, dharma talk and conversation.
Register to participate. All are welcome.
David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community
