Hi All,

I am very content to share with the entire Sangha photographs of ....

... our new (although in a redone old building) ZAZEN HALL! Thanks to our wonderful carpenters, Aita san and Ushioda san, the new/old Zen Hall at Treeleaf in Japan is now about ready ... the tatami mats are in, the Zafus, and Buddha is in his place ...

... all that we await are some lights and heat. I mean, I could do that the old fashioned way ... with oil lamps and hot coals. But that is why many an old Japanese building burned to the ground!. So, I think I will wait for the more modern way! 8)

I am also moving ahead to organize a sitting group here in our town to come sit in it! It could sit about 25 to 30 people, if there were ever that many to sit in it.

(Please see the pictures below of the east half the interior with our Buddha in the center of the room, and the exterior in scaffolding as they are still repairing the outside which has been heavily damaged over the years. )

As I have mentioned before our "Treeleaf Zen Center' in Tsukuba is not meant to be a ‘Buddhist temple’, but a western style ‘zen center’ as one might now find in so many towns and cities in North America and Europe. That means that it is meant to be just a place to drop in to sit Zazen and learn a bit about Zen practice and philosophy. I am trying to bring a bit of the vibrancy and creativity of Zen in the West back to the "home country" of Japan.

This new addition accompanies our daily "Sit-a-long with Jundo" Zazen netcast's moving home on January 1st to SHAMBHALA SUNSPACE, the webpage of the Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma magazines, where we will be a daily featured Buddhist blog ... sitting there just as we do now at Beliefnet. You should not notice much change in the content, however, and I will continue as my usually dull self.

Here is the Shambhala Sunspace. They have promised to let me know our new URL this week, which I shall pass on as soon as I hear ...

http://www.shambhalasun.com/sunspace/

So, that's the news! Please join in the celebration, and I hope you will come sit in our new Zen Hall in Japan someday.

Gassho, Jundo