Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

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Varela Contemplative Science Retreat 2026: Opening Session (Part 1) Aug 30, 2026

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In this opening session (Part 1) of the Varela Contemplative Science Retreat, Roshi Joan Halifax welcomes practitioners on-site and online, tracing the retreat’s roots to her decades-long friendship with the late neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner Francisco Varela and how their conversations from 1981 ultimately seeded what became the Mind and Life Institute. Roshi reminds the room that this…

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Our Care-full Attention (Part 7 of 7) Aug 29, 2026

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In this final session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer takes up Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra, tracing how sustained attention dissolves the boundary between self and world. Drawing on stories from her own practice life, she returns often to the way small, ordinary contact with things — a stone, a teacup, a mountain trail — can either be led by our concepts or…

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Faculty Reflections (Part 6) Aug 29, 2026

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Reverend Tenmyo Dojima introduces baika, the Soto Zen tradition of Buddhist hymn-singing, chanting a hymn drawn from one of Dogen’s own poems: “Even upon a high, steep cliff where the rough waves cannot reach, the true Dharma clings and takes firm root, just as oysters cling to the rock.” Roshi Joan introduces the faculty panel of the weekend’s…

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Dogen Seminar 2026: The Four Methods of Guidance (Part 5) Aug 29, 2026

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Roshi Norman Fischer takes up Dogen’s fascicle Bodhisattva Shishobo, the Four Methods of Guidance: generosity, kind speech, beneficial action, and identity action. He frames this text as a departure from Dogen’s earlier work — scholars believe it may reflect a late-life turn in Dogen away from esoteric philosophy and toward plain ethical conduct.

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Contemporary Dogen (Part 4) Aug 29, 2026

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Sensei Kaz Tanahashi traces Dogen’s contemporary journey from a Zen ancestor barely mentioned by D.T. Suzuki — whose paradigm of sudden awakening had little room for Dogen’s teaching — to a figure now studied in more than two hundred English-language publications and translated into other languages across the world. He recounts his own thirty-three…

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Dongshan and the Five Ranks (Part 3) Aug 29, 2026

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Roshi Konjin Gaelyn Godwin gives a close textual reading of Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, tracing a single koan — when a monk asks how to escape cold and heat, and Dongshan answers, “When it’s cold, the cold kills you. When it’s hot, the heat kills you” — through the Blue Cliff Record, multiple named commentators, and competing translations.

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Cultural Legacy (Part 2) Aug 29, 2026

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In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Steven Heine, professor of religion and history and director of Asian Studies at Florida International University, traces Dogen’s life and teaching — from proverbs posted at Soto temple gates to manga retellings of his years in China. Returning to a question raised the night before, about Bodhidharma’s charge to “bear what is unbearable…

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Dogen Seminar 2026: Inspiration for Everyday Life – Opening Session (Part 1) Aug 29, 2026

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In this opening session of Upaya’s 2026 Dogen Seminar, Roshi Joan Halifax welcomes a gathering of teachers assembled to explore the life and teaching of Eihei Dogen, the 13th-century Zen master and founder of the Soto school of Zen. Sensei Kaz Tanahashi, whose decades of translation work brought Dogen’s Shobogenzo into English, traces its long path from centuries of obscurity to worldwide…

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Vimalakirti, the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Bodhisattva Path Aug 24, 2026

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, physicist Adam Frank, PhD, admits he came to Buddhism hoping for the infinite cosmic power of his own enlightenment, and maybe more honestly, to face and resolve his own suffering. He stayed for something else entirely. Drawing on a year and a half spent with the Vimalakirti and Avatamsaka Sutras, he traces how these early Mahayana texts reimagined practice…

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The World We Know is Possible: Cultivating Peace & Compassionate Action Aug 17, 2026

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Valerie Brown discusses how spiritual power and presence are among the greatest forces for healing and transformation, personally and societally. Now, more than ever, we are called to look deeply and to live deeply interconnected to each other and to the more than human world, to cultivate hope grounded in wise, skillful, and compassionate action…

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