PZI Teacher Archives

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Dharma Theme Library

There are 41 pieces here.

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Dharma Theme October 30, 2023

Dharma Theme: Stop Suffering!

PZI Teachers

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.

36 Words

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Dharma Theme October 25, 2023
31 Words

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Dharma Theme August 2, 2023

Dharma Theme: Sickness and Medicine

PZI Teachers

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.

55 Words

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Dharma Theme August 1, 2023

Dharma Theme: Friendships & Meetings – Relationships in the Dao, Then & Now

PZI Teachers

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.

180 Words

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Dharma Theme August 1, 2023

Dharma Theme: Dealing with Demons

PZI Teachers

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.

153 Words

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Dharma Theme August 1, 2023
51 Words

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Dharma Theme July 26, 2023
19 Words

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Dharma Theme July 25, 2023

Dharma Theme: Creatures of the Summer Dawn – Summer Sesshin 2023

John Tarrant, PZI Teachers

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.

78 Words

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023
43 Words

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023

Dharma Theme: Adrift

PZI Teachers

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.

15 Words

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023
29 Words

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023

Dharma Theme: Fire – The Extremes of Climate Change

PZI Teachers

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.

131 Words

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023

Dharma Theme: The Ink Drawings of Hakuin Ekaku

Here you will find a sampling of ink drawings by the great Zen ancestor Hakuin Ekaku.

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Dharma Theme June 9, 2023

Dharma Theme: Meeting the Inconceivable

PZI Teachers

What you can conceive of might take away your life. On the other hand, what you cannot conceive of will give you your life.

144 Words

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Dharma Theme May 12, 2023

Dharma Theme: Animal Teachers

PZI 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.

17 Words

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Dharma Theme May 10, 2023

Dharma Theme: Haiku for You

PZI Teachers

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.

566 Words

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Dharma Theme May 4, 2023
65 Words

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Dharma Theme May 1, 2023
135 Words

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Dharma Theme April 25, 2023

Dharma Theme: Descent! Darken Further

PZI Teachers

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.

42 Words

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Dharma Theme April 12, 2023

Dharma Theme: Dragon Teachers & Magical Creatures

PZI Teachers

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.

258 Words

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Dharma Theme March 29, 2023

Dharma Theme: Not Getting It – Doing It Wrong

PZI Teachers

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.

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Dharma Theme March 29, 2023

Dharma Theme: Tea Ladies, Hermits, & Other Strange Teachers Along the Way

PZI Teachers

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.

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Dharma Theme March 22, 2023

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.

23 Words

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Dharma Theme March 15, 2023

Dharma Theme: Baizhang’s Fox – Cause & Effect in a Fox Life

PZI Teachers

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. 

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Dharma Theme March 10, 2023

Dharma Theme: Past Midnight – Discoveries in the Dark

PZI Teachers

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.

245 Words

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Dharma Theme February 9, 2023

Dharma Theme: A Solitary Boat Making Its Way – Winter Sesshin 2023

PZI Teachers

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.

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Dharma Theme October 24, 2022
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Dharma Theme August 11, 2022

Dharma Theme: Taking Part in the Gathering – Summer Sesshin 2022

John Tarrant, PZI Cantor & Musicians, PZI Teachers

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.

385 Words

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Dharma Theme June 11, 2022

Dharma Theme: John Tarrant’s Zenosaurus Koans 1–19

John Tarrant

ZENOSAURUS: 19 Koans with introductions and commentaries from John Tarrant, as first published on his website, tarrantworks.

103 Words

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Article February 1, 2022

Dharma Theme: Articles by John Tarrant

John Tarrant

Here you’ll find a list of links to published articles written by John Tarrant. Publication credits are included in each file.

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