January 4, 2025
We are excited to welcome Vipassana Vijayarangan as the new Boundless Mind Temple Administrator at BZC! Please enjoy the heartful message from her below, and learn more about her in the Staff section.

Dear Sangha,
The darker days, stillness of winter, and beginning of a new year support a period of reflection for me. It wasn’t until I started writing this did I realize that it may be the oldest personal ritual that I have had. And it is entirely new to offer reflections to my community this time around the sun. I am grateful.
An origin story of my relationship with Zen could start anywhere–the first time I entered the Zendo of BMT in unbearable pain, or years before when I sat my first retreat, or as a child reading stories of Siddhartha Gautama, or whatever mysterious forces led to my life, or yesterday when I felt delight in sending an email as a part of my role as Administrator of Boundless Mind Temple.
Delight in a work email discussing logistics was not an experience that I had noticed before I started working at Brooklyn Zen Center. Work emails were often boring if not annoying. I would have found work emails too trivial as a newsletter topic, but in the container of Zen, everything is something to sit with. An email may help a guest teacher with arriving at the BMT, find missing petals for a Rohatsu ceremony, or inform the Sangha of schedule changes. Perhaps the nature of a work email, like a lot of things, is neither good nor bad. Working at BZC has been different to all my other jobs because my relationship to work, colleagues, and my impulses is an inquiry that often arises in me. To paraphrase the Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, perhaps it is not in the thing but in the inquiring impulse. Zen has nurtured inquiries over declarations.
Before BZC became my workplace, it held Sangha. In the time of Shakyamuni, Sangha was the term that the earliest republics, in the region that is now the Nepal-India border, called themselves. I have been wondering about the use of a term with origins in governance and politics to also refer to a spiritual community. The etymology of Sangha, the overlap of it with my workplace, and my engagement with governance has been turning like a koan in me with the question: How do I live in the present, right here, with all my particularities, and earn a livelihood in relationship with all beings? Being an administrator at BZC while work, also feels like practice. And practicing has taught me that I don’t need to declare a way, I can keep inquiring into the relationship between all questions and parts of me.
In the Tamil calendar that I grew up with, now is not the time of a new year but the ninth month of the Tamil Solar year, Maarghazhi, that spans between mid-December and mid-January. It is considered an auspicious month to reflect and deepen spiritual practice. This ritual of reflection that I have considered personal has been part of the community I was born into for centuries. This sharing of reflections in a newsletter is a monthly ritual of my Sangha. I wonder if origins and reflections don’t live in a single place, time, or being. They may be like glass beads in a Kaleidoscope tumbling in beautiful unknowable ways. Thank you, dear Sangha, for tumbling alongside me.
Gasshō,
Vipassana
Administrator, Boundless Mind Temple