PZI Teacher Archives

Zhuangzi

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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
Video May 3, 2023

Watching the Tracks of the Flying Birds

John Tarrant

John remarks on being freed from the hospital after a brush with Covid and more, and feeling our ties to the birds, symbolizing freedom through their ability to take off at will. Also: The legend of the painter who disappeared on the back of a painted crane, and the Zhuangzi’s fish named Kuhn who becomes a bird. Recorded April 23, 2023

73' 5"
Audio April 28, 2023

Watching the Tracks of the Flying Birds

John Tarrant

John remarks on being freed from the hospital after a brush with Covid and more, and feeling our ties to the birds, symbolizing freedom through their ability to take off at will. Also: The legend of the painter who disappeared on the back of a painted crane, and the Zhuangzi’s fish named Kuhn who becomes a bird. Recorded April 23, 2023

73' 6"
Video April 1, 2023

Everywhere! It’s Everywhere You Look

John Tarrant

Zhuangzi said, “We wander in borderless vastness; Great Knowledge enters in, and we don’t know where it will ever end.” Dharma talk given by John Tarrant in a Sunday Zen session on February 26, 2023.

63' 4"
Audio March 13, 2023

Everywhere – It’s Everywhere You Look

John Tarrant

“Feeling the time,” is a line from the poet Du Fu—the time is always with us. And it’s always too early to despair. We’re just here. Not wanting anything to be different. Objections are full of knowing! You step out of the way you are perceiving the world, the dream of who you are, you turn the light backward. Recorded February 26, 2023.

63' 5"

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Article September 17, 2021

Carl Jung’s Red Book

John Tarrant

Jung’s journey is interesting, harrowing, ridiculous, pompous, incomprehensible, amusing, sad, frightening, wise—the whole range of the human is there. Jung’s point of meeting with Buddhism is that, at a time when darkness seemed and was near, he offered the example of a trust in the deepest possibility of transformation, and in the involuntary processes that we contain, and in the depths of what it is to be human.

2200 Words
Text July 13, 2021

Solstice, Juneteenth, a Butterfly Flies Up!

John Tarrant

Even a time of torpor, or a time when plans come apart, or we thought the culture was going in one way and it’s going in another—we rely on the spaciousness, we rely on not what we’ve planned and schemed, but we rely on what’s been opened up in our hearts. Transcript from the PZI Zen Online recording from Sunday, June 21, 2020.

6403 Words
Audio May 7, 2021
6' 19"
Audio May 7, 2021

Free & Easy Wandering Series: Following the Scented Grass

John Tarrant

John Tarrant begins with a wild Daoist story from the Zhuangzi, about a giant fish named Kun. The freedom is in your own breast and the koan path opens the way. Includes meditation segments, music from Michael Wilding, vows from Jordan McConnell & Amaryllis Fletcher, Cantor. PZI Zen Online. As recorded May 2, 2021.

73' 39"
Audio June 22, 2020

The Great Turning: Solstice, Juneteenth, A Butterfly Flies Up!

John Tarrant

Solstice and the big wheels turn. Juneteenth celebrations & demonstrations are encouraging. Navigating and feeling the covid bardos of long confinement. Has nothing happened? Maybe all sorts of things are happening? “We can’t stay here long.” What is a border? Old injustices are looming. Readings from Slave Narratives, poetry of Li Bai, Alberto Rios, Czeslaw Milosz. Sunday Zen session recorded June 21, 2020.

96' 1"
Video August 15, 2019

The Transformation of Things

Allison Atwill

Allison talks about the transformation of things from a story in the Zhuangzi, where Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly. Our plans to become a butterfly are a kind of pressing into ourselves and the world. The flaw is in thinking we have to learn how to transform. Morning dharma talk in Summer Sesshin at Mount Madonna Center, recorded in July 2019.

58' 22"
Video August 2, 2019
31' 33"
Video July 31, 2019

Knock on Any Door – Daoist Masters and Zen Koans

John Tarrant

John Tarrant talks about the bond between Daoism and Chan Zen. See transcription with same name https://www.pacificzen.org/library/knock-on-any-door-daoist-masters-zen-koans/

33' 12"
Video July 22, 2019
14' 30"