PZI Teacher Archives

Text Library

There are 232 pieces here.

Text August 24, 2023

The Nobility of Having a Practice

John Tarrant, PZI Teachers

It’s not so hard to realize that practice is immediately beneficial. But there’s a deeper thing: meditation is a way to befriend your life and befriend reality. Some days just seem harder than others, right? And you come home and think, Oh, god. Practice is a good thing then. Practice, practice, practice.

5097 Words

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Poem August 2, 2023

Ceremonies: Spring Prospects

John Tarrant

Dufu’s The View This Spring, Changan, 757. This is a poem to be read in time of war.

93 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
Text July 26, 2023

Carried in the Dark – On Lostness & the Spiral Path of Practice

John Tarrant

I’ve been thinking that everybody needs to start by being lost. And that the Dharma is a spiral path. It will happen again, and then again, and then again. So, when you are lost, instead of thinking, “This is an abnormal, wrong situation,” that’s what koans give us—they say, “Oh, well, I’m lost, fortunately. I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

4196 Words

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Dharma Theme July 26, 2023
19 Words
Text July 26, 2023

Dahui’s Journey, Bodhidharma’s Response, & the Marvelous Duke

John Tarrant

So, if you stop being afraid, if you stop being wonderful, if you stop being charming, if we stop charming each other, we’re just here in the vastness with no agenda, and that’s the Daoism that’s at the core of Chan. Emptiness is here. That’s what I think is a good thing.

5028 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
Text June 28, 2023

Falling Into the Well of Sesshin

John Tarrant

The nice thing about falling is it’s already happened, you know? It started already; there’s not much you can do about it. So you’re kind of free, in a way. It’s sort of like being condemned: Knowing you’ll die tomorrow—well, you can do anything you want tonight.

4081 Words
Text June 23, 2023

We Are Interwoven

John Tarrant

It’s a noble thing to gather together for the Dharma. It has hidden effects, that if we thought about it from afar, we’d think, Ah, I don’t know. But when we’re together, we can feel, Oh, yeah, it’s happening. I can feel it in my heart and my soul and my fingers.

3004 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.

0 Words

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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.

0 Words
Text March 29, 2023

A Dog’s Life

John Tarrant

John tells a story about dogs and Buddha nature upon the death of a beloved dog: Animals have their own large awareness in which we can share. Meditation is one way to do this. It resets the mind to zero and we stop waving our arms about so much, and we enter a communion with the universe. 

1531 Words

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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.

0 Words
Text March 27, 2023

Here

John Tarrant

Like trees and giraffes, delusions appear to be the opposite of emptiness. But when you really settle into being lost and uncertain, that is an open gate. It comes to be called “here.”

766 Words
Text March 26, 2023

Falling with the Koan NO

John Tarrant

John Tarrant gives a talk on Zhaozhou’s NO: This koan is often offered as a first “gate,” but I think you need to already be in trouble and falling before it’s useful. Life is always offering us that cliff—that door of falling. When you’re falling, you can’t screw it up because actually there’s not a lot you can do. But what you do will be very free and won’t be constrained by the usual. From a recording made in Fall Sesshin 2022.

5207 Words

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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