PZI Teacher Archives
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Allison Atwill -
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Jesse Cardin -
John Tarrant -
Jon Joseph -
Michelle Riddle -
Tess Beasley
Dharma Theme Library
There are 41 pieces here.
Dharma Theme: Stop Suffering!
We’re always looking for a recipe or data points to get a handle on happiness. The most profoundly simple but difficult challenge is to let ourselves transform into ourselves. We imagine a different, better self “after awakening.” Every stroke, even the most difficult or painful, is part of the piece. Our journey through suffering transforms everything, including the destination.
Dharma Theme: The Storehouse of Treasures Opens by Itself – 2023 Online Fall Retreat
Here you will find links to dharma talk audios from PZI’s Online Fall Retreat: The Storehouse of Treasures Opens by Itself with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers. Includes music from Amaryllis Fletcher, Amanda Boughton & Jordan McConnell. Recorded in the PZI Digital Temple, September 27–30, 2023.
Dharma Theme: Sickness and Medicine
Usually, casually, I think of myself as being well. When I am sick, wellness is the me I imagine I’ll get back to. I can’t always be sure what is healing and what is the opposite.
Dharma Theme: Friendships & Meetings – Relationships in the Dao, Then & Now
Zen is about meeting—we make friends with each koan and allow the universe to work with and through us. The sweetness, and even the gnarly bits of friendship are part of the intimacy at the center of meeting. In the field of connectedness we discover things we can’t discover on our own.
Dharma Theme: Dealing with Demons
If you’ve got demons, you’re alive! But you don’t have to get on board with them. Demons come out of your own heart, just like enlightenment.
Dharma Theme: Great Silence
Have confidence: just go into the silence. The absolute is always there. Inside it all, there’s freedom. There’s no situation where infinity is not there.
Dharma Theme: Landscape as Teacher
PZI Teachers
When we wake up and see our true place in the universe, it’s as if we have stepped out of a landscape and then we’re willing to step back into it. We appear and go back into the brocade. Then, we have our true place in the universe.
Dharma Theme: Creatures of the Summer Dawn – Summer Sesshin 2023
Here you will find links to audio and video dharma talks from PZI’s Great Summer Sesshin: Creatures of the Summer Dawn with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers. Includes music from Amaryllis Fletcher, Michael Wilding and Jordan McConnell. Held in person at Santa Sabina Center from June 12–18, 2023.
Dharma Theme: Home and Not Home
It is the Chan way to understand that the fullness of life resides in us, and the experience of life, whatever it is, is all for you. Our task is to have the life we have.
Dharma Theme: Adrift
The mind is a great artist, ceaselessly creating and assessing problems. The territory of the koan is finding the delicious helplessness of the mind and body, and settling into that—it’s the robe of the moment.
Dharma Theme: Where Do We Go When We Die?
Questions about death and the after-death are a part of the traditional Chan koan curriculum. Dignified by their antiquity, they are the primordial instance of that which cannot be negotiated with.
Dharma Theme: Fire – The Extremes of Climate Change
Our era is undoubtedly difficult, and even crazy. We are in an underworld time. We know that we’re cutting down ancient trees, burning fossil fuels, melting the sustaining ice, finding leaders who pretend that we have no part in the changes that overwhelm us. We are suffering from forces greater than us and also from ourselves; we too are forces beyond our control.
Dharma Theme: The Ink Drawings of Hakuin Ekaku
Here you will find a sampling of ink drawings by the great Zen ancestor Hakuin Ekaku.
Dharma Theme: Meeting the Inconceivable
What you can conceive of might take away your life. On the other hand, what you cannot conceive of will give you your life.
Dharma Theme: Animal Teachers
Animals give us the gifts of their living presence, and we feel the profound effect they have on our lives. Animals surprise and enlarge us. We become the animal we are seeing, and that is a primary Zen move. The way we become the world that we are part of, is a profound part of Zen.
Dharma Theme: Haiku for You
Koans and poetry tumble over each other. Old Zen masters used snatches of poetry as koans. Good poetry has an objective quality and is related to koanville in that way. It does not try to persuade or recruit.
Dharma Theme: What Is This, Anyway?
What is this? is an ancient question—it holds our whole lives. That wondering is the essence of what it is to be human.
Dharma Theme: Great Ancestor Linji
Meet Great Ancestor Linji: “A nine-colored Phoenix, a thousand-mile horse.” That’s how Linji was described in early Chan times.
Dharma Theme: Descent! Darken Further
Accepting the descent, and accepting the quality of being lost when it appears, is profoundly important. And there’s a great, strange, and interesting mystery in that.
Dharma Theme: Dragon Teachers & Magical Creatures
Anything might be in the Blue Dragon’s cave: awakening, memories, sorrows, dance moves—all the possibilities of your life might be there. You just fall into meditation in the Blue Dragon’s cave. Perhaps your whole life is blessed—every struggle and confusion itself.
Dharma Theme: Not Getting It – Doing It Wrong
The Zen approach is not about avoiding mistakes but bringing them to the path. Making a mistake opens the tenderness in us and can be more helpful than not making one. Then, the mistakes are not mistakes.
Dharma Theme: Tea Ladies, Hermits, & Other Strange Teachers Along the Way
To meet a Tea Lady was always a somewhat risky proposition. Usually, in koan-ville, an unsuspecting traveler hurrying on their way somewhere else—consumed with their own knowledge and problems— would encounter a tiny wayside establishment with a deeply mysterious proprietor on hand.
Dharma Theme: In the Wild – Mountain Koans & Poems
PZI Teachers
Eventually you come to a place where you can’t go on and you can’t go back. You have arrived at the base of cliffs; you can’t scale them, you can’t get around them, and there’s no handy tunnel through them. It’s a daunting place—that’s the point of it. And when you arrive here your life and your journey can become your own.
Dharma Theme: Baizhang’s Fox – Cause & Effect in a Fox Life
How many lifetimes do we spend in our fox suits? They are not wasted. All forms are part of the lively package of existence. Turning words and sudden awakenings even from long-suffering can appear anywhere and in the most unexpected ways.
Dharma Theme: Past Midnight – Discoveries in the Dark
These dharma talks and texts, like Dongshan’s First Rank, wander in the hours before moonrise when anything can appear. Being lost, or in the dark, is a necessary condition on the Way.
Dharma Theme: A Solitary Boat Making Its Way – Winter Sesshin 2023
HERE ARE WINTER SESSHIN AUDIO RECORDINGS of dharma talks, including music from Cantor Amaryllis Fletcher, and musicians Amanda Boughton, Michael Wilding and Jordan McConnell. (These will be added as they are edited A complete audio record of talks from PZI’s Live-Online Winter Sesshin 2023, January 31–February 5, 2023. Videos also available in the KALPA library.
Dharma Theme: Door After Door Opening Inside – Fall Sesshin 2022
A complete audio record of talks from PZI’s Live-Online Fall Sesshin 2022, October 4-9, 2022.
Dharma Theme: Taking Part in the Gathering – Summer Sesshin 2022
Here is our curation of full-length Summer Sesshin dharma talk audios on a single page, for easy finding and listening. A sesshin is more than the sum of its parts or recorded talks—there are personal interviews and deep meditation, teaching talks and conversations, old friends and new, ceremonies, brilliant teachers, music, great enlightenment, mistakes, and delight. The play of the universe. Recorded at Santa Sabina Center, June 13-19, 2022.
Dharma Theme: John Tarrant’s Zenosaurus Koans 1–19
ZENOSAURUS: 19 Koans with introductions and commentaries from John Tarrant, as first published on his website, tarrantworks.
Dharma Theme: Articles by John Tarrant
Here you’ll find a list of links to published articles written by John Tarrant. Publication credits are included in each file.