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 Watts
F E A T U R E D
October 13: Sunday Zen at 10:30 AM PDT with John Tarrant & Friends
October 22–27 Fall Sesshin: The 1000-Armed Goddess of Mercy
November 16 Daylong: Zen and the Goddess Part II
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WEDNESDAY ZEN: Cuckoo! with David Weinstein
June 28, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Free – $10
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For whom do you bathe and make yourself beautiful?
The voice of the cuckoo is calling you home.
Hundreds of flowers fall, yet the voice is not stilled;
even deep in jumbled mountains, it is calling clearly.
—Dongshan
The first thing that jumped out to me, from this koan, is the cuckoo. The cuckoo is a brood parasite, meaning it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests. They do not build their own nests, and instead rely on other birds to raise their chicks. During the breeding season, a female cuckoo will deposit eggs in up to fifty different nests. A cuckoo can dart into an unattended nest, snatch up an egg, lay a close copy and be gone within ten seconds. After hatching cuckoo, chicks instinctively shove their foster siblings and remaining eggs out of the nest, to have all the food to themselves.
Not exactly the kind of example I would aspire to, and perhaps that is exactly the point.
The one that I bathe and make myself beautiful for is the cuckoo. The cuckoo that doesn’t have a home. The cuckoo who is not at home in himself and is concerned about appearances. The cuckoo who pushes the other birds and eggs out of the nest so he can have it all. Though flowers have fallen hundreds of times, I have been unable to still its calling me home to the jumbled mountains of my mind.
Trying to still its call doesn’t work.
Dongshan was interested in the question of whether non-sentient beings can teach or not. I imagine asking that question to be something that would arise amidst the awareness of someone who appreciated that all sentient beings are teaching us, including cuckoos, and that his choice of cuckoos—brood parasites that they are and were in Dongshan’s time—was not an accident.
As the fox koan of our recent retreat showed us, to be free from the body of a fox we must be the fox that we are. Similarly, to still the call of the cuckoo, we must be the cuckoo that we are.
Join us for a koan, meditation, dharma talk, & conversation.
All are welcome. Register to participate.
—David
