DHARMA
Essays, recorded talks and teachings from Roshi Jundo Cohen and the teachers and priests at Treeleaf Sangha
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Jundo Offers: The Answer to -All- Complaints about Zazen
In Just Sitting, one can leap through the little self’s selfish wants and desires to a wholeness free of all little wants and desires. The wholeness without desire or want is revealed as always here when…
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Hard Way, Gentle Way, Middle Way, Non-Way
Whether hard path or gentle path, this path is ultimately a non-path of non-practice. There is ultimately nothing to attain that has not been here and all things all along, every one a single facet…
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How To Travel In Space Without a Rocket
Here, I will tell you the secret to travel across the cosmos, all without need for a rocket, not bound by the speed of light. How? It sounds like some mystical and magical ability, some…
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Just Sitting and Being With Serious Health Issues
To live with serious illness such as dialysis-dependent kidney failure, heart disease, and pulmonary embolism (blood clots in the lungs) is not simply to endure physical suffering. It is to walk daily along the edge…
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Bowing to the Harm Doer
Sometimes I am asked why, in some of our ceremonies such as Jukai (Undertaking the Precepts) we bow to our parents even if, in some tragic cases, those parents may have been absent or even…
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How to Stop Time
I will now teach you how to stop time, halting right in its tracks the rush of passing time from yesterday to today to tomorrow. I will also demonstrate how to experience the timeless, as…
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223 – Precepts, Not Politics
In our Sangha, we believe in upholding the Precepts and our Bodhisattva Vows to save suffering sentient beings, but we avoid debate and discussions of overt “politics.” It is often a fine line to tread.…
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Enchantment In This Modern World
I read in a Buddhist scholar’s commentary that many modern folks in the West are “disenchanted” about life, much more than people 5000, 500 or even 50 years ago, or folks in non-Western, more traditional…
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Zen and the Art of Swimming
Sometimes I reach for analogies to express this Zen way. Today, as the weather warms, I turn to swimming … Imagine this world as a great pool, beyond Olympic-size, vast, holding all the world and…
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Here, There, Everywhere
| talks & essays – Roshi Jundo Cohen – As a young man, in search of “true Zen,” Master Dogen made the dangerous journey to China, experiencing great sea storms and illness along the way.…
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223: Revolution in the Ten Directions
| talks & essays – Roshi Jundo Cohen – We need a revolutionary movement of left wing, right wing and center together. Yes, it sounds impossible, even counter-intuitive. How can so many different people of…
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223: Good Karma for Change
| talks & essays – Roshi Jundo Cohen – In the face of so many, seemingly insurmountable problems in society, in our families, friendships and other relationships, Karma is a sword of change in this…
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223: A Buddhist Resistance-Non-Resistance Movement
Meet the angry with non-anger. If you react with anger, you only cause suffering to yourself, increase the chances that you will react excessively and worsen the situation, may further incite anger and violence in…
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“Nothing to Do” is Not “Wallowing in Thoughts”
| talks & essays – Roshi Jundo Cohen – I have heard some folks misunderstand the “Nothing to Attain, Nothing in Need of Doing” of Shikantaza Zazen as meaning we “just sit there,” wallowing in thoughts, stewing…
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“Nothing to Attain,” a Doorless Doorway to Great Enlightenment
However, Shikantaza’s radical sitting of the self-free-of-the-self is an excellent path to realization of the radical Equanimity, Peace and Wholeness of a Buddha, realizing the dropping away of self/other and all divisions. Even notions of “enlightenment vs.…
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How Zen Solves All Your Problems!
This Path opens us to a Face of reality Clear and Whole, in which there is no death, no loss, no being apart. There is no separate self amid Wholeness, nor is one ever bound…
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Liberation and the Hard World
| talks & essays – Roshi Jundo Cohen – As I write these words, fires, earthquakes and wars are raging, children around the world are hungry and in danger, refugees are fleeing oppression, homeless sleep…