What are we here for?: Audio Dharma Talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson (2023/03/18)

The dharma talk offered by Sarah Dōjin Emerson at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn on March 18th is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

What are we here for?: Audio Dharma Talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson (2023/03/18)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

Stewarding a Tradition: Follow-up and Resources

A message from BZC’s Administrative Director Ryan Lee Wong, following the March 11 Sangha Meeting on Membership, Engagement, and Stewarding a Tradition.

Dear Sangha,

Thank you for offering your attention and wholehearted engagement at last Saturday’s Sangha Meeting on Membership, Engagement, and Stewarding a Tradition. It was a joy to share this research, history, and embodied practice with you all.

For those who weren’t able to attend, a video is now available here.

In the meantime, here are some ways to deepen engagement with this practice of dana and stewardship.

Membership
  • Existing members can check and change their membership level by emailing our Operations Assistant David Chow here.
  • New and existing members can use the Equitable Pricing Model to feel into their appropriate Membership Level (think of the Limited, Base, Sustaining, and Flourishing rates as roughly equivalent to program pricing)

Readings and Resources

  • Soto Zen in Medieval Japan by William Bodiford on the historical and economic development of earl Soto Zen
  • American Sutra by Duncan Ryuken Williams on Japanese American Buddhists during WWII and how sanghas kept their temples and practice alive
  • Zenshuji’s 100th Anniversary Lecture Series on the development of Soto Zen in America
  • Presentation slideshow
  • Dogen Zenji’s Fundraising Letter
With deep gratitude for our collective practice,
Ryan

Spiritual Discipline: Audio Dharma Talk by Kaira Jewel Lingo (2023/03/04)

The dharma talk offered by Kaira Jewel Lingo at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn on March 4th is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Spiritual Discipline: Audio Dharma Talk by Kaira Jewel Lingo (2023/03/04)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

About Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo teaches meditation and mindfulness internationally, with a focus on activists, people of color, artists, educators, families, and youth. She began practicing mindfulness in 1997. An ordained nun of 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Order of Interbeing, she is now based in Washington, D.C., leading retreats in the U.S. and internationally, offering mindfulness programs for educators and youth in schools, as well as individual spiritual mentoring. She edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s, Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children and has articles and chapters published in numerous magazines and books, including Real World Mindfulness for BeginnersTogether we are One;  and Dharma, Color and Culture. She explores the interweaving of art, play, ecology and spiritual practice and is a certified yoga teacher and InterPlay leader. She also offers spiritual mentoring to individual clients. In addition to her roots in the Zen tradition, she practices and teaches in the Insight tradition and is an affiliate teacher with the Insight Meditation Community of WashingtonVisit kairajewel.com to learn more.

Giving and Receiving

A message from Alexandra Gekas and Tom Weinreich, BZC Membership Committee co-chairs:

Dear Sangha,

Last September, forty or fifty of us gathered for a ritual of generosity. It was the beginning of the fall practice period at Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC), and we had devoted ourselves to practicing together for the coming ninety days. We sat in a circle. Each of us shared our specific intention for our practice that season, and then joined our hands and said, “giving and receiving, I take refuge in sangha.”

But what is given, and who gives? It seems that we give our intentions to the sangha. Maybe the sangha gives us support with the insecurity and doubt we feel about fulfilling our intentions. We may offer the sangha the courage of speaking up in the midst of that insecurity and doubt. Certainly the ancestors who passed on this way of supporting each other are also giving us something. Is there an offering we are making to them in return?

Actually, there is no way to break these apart. Giving and receiving, we take refuge in sangha. All enumerations and accounts of it will be incomplete. This generosity is endless, dynamic, and whole.

This month, we are having a membership drive. Becoming a BZC member, like joining a practice period, is an act of sangha generosity. In the conventional view, it looks like a practitioner making a monthly payment to support BZC, and BZC offering that practitioner discounts on programs and events. It is also a complete expression of generosity which cannot be separated out into a giver, a receiver, and a gift.

Regardless of your current membership status, we are inviting you to take some time this month to reflect on how this sangha nourishes you. The fast pace of our lives can make this difficult. See if you can slow down and savor what has been freely given.

There is no price to pay for this generosity, no debt accrued. If this reflection awakens generosity in your heart, membership is one opportunity to practice expressing that. We want to caution against the idea that one “should” become a member, or that being a member entitles us to ignore the next request which arises. We give our membership dues as freely as the dharma is given to us.

On Saturday, March 11th, please join Ryan Lee Wong, BZC Administrative Director, and dharma teachers Sarah Dōjin Emerson and Charlie Korin Pokorny Senseis for a sangha meeting on Membership, Engagement, and Stewarding a Tradition at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn, from 12 noon to 1pm, followed by pizza.

In addition, on Tuesday, March 21st, from 7 to 8:30pm, we will host an online gathering on Practicing with Membership, for members and non-members alike. This will be an intimate conversation for us to share how we relate membership to the practice of dana and stewardship of Soto Zen Buddhism at a socially engaged temple in America. We will sit, reflect, and discuss our experience together. We hope to see you there! You can find more details here.

Finally, we will close out the month with a movie night for all old and new members on Friday, March 31st. The evening will include dinner and socializing at 6pm, followed by the film screening at 7pm. Join us!

With love,

Alexandra Gekas and Tom Weinreich
BZC Membership Committee co-chairs

Amid Crisis, Surrendering to Love: new audio dharma talk by Shingetsu Laura O’Loughlin

The dharma talk offered by Shingetsu Laura O’Loughlin at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn on February 25 is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Amid Crisis, Surrendering to Love: Audio Dharma Talk by Shingetsu Laura O’Loughlin (2023/02/25)

The author mentioned during the dharma is Frank Ostaseki and the book is “The Five Invitations.”

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

February at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple: A Month in Photographs

Each month, we’ll be sharing photographs of life at Sōshinji, Ancestral Heart Zen Temple. All Brooklyn Zen Center members are warmly invited to come practice here, and to experience Zen monastic training. Please email ahdirector@brooklynzen.org for more information.


Ancestral Heart Zen Temple was closed for 10 days this month, because three of us–Ian, Don, and Kaishin–caught COVID. We were extremely fortunate in that none of us had serious symptoms, and we were well cared for by Rachel, Wesley, Jeff, and Gerardo who took on all the cooking, dog care, and house care, and brought us our food on lovingly prepared trays like this one.


Molly and Milo took on the roles of Ian’s COVID nurses.


Garden season is just around the corner! This is our beautiful garden altar, built by former Shissui (work leader) Emme, who departed the monastery this month, returning to the marketplace with gift-bestowing hands.


Here’s Ryan, planting some of the first seeds of the season: Onions!


This year, Rachel stepped into the role of Shika (guest manager). They care for visitors and for the temple, embodying work that is both sacred and mundane – like folding laundry.


Gerardo (right) joined us this month, for a long-term stay! Here he is receiving instructions from the Tenzo (Don, left) on cooking lunch. This is a candid photo, we swear.


Jeff departed this month, leaving us with one of his backdoor snack masterpieces.

Being Together Differently: new audio dharma talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson

The dharma talk offered by Sarah Dōjin Emerson at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn on February 18 is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Being Together Differently: Audio dharma talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson (2023/02/18)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

Love, Not-knowing and Hope: new audio dharma talk by Charlie Korin Pokorny

A dharma talk offered by Charlie Korin Pokorny at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn in January is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Love, Not-knowing and Hope: Audio dharma talk by Charlie Korin Pokorny (2023/01/21)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

Grieving and Freedom: new audio dharma talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson

A dharma talk offered by Sarah Dōjin Emerson at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn in January is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Grieving and Freedom: Audio dharma talk by Sarah Dōjin Emerson (2023/01/28)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

New audio dharma talk by Kidō Ian Case

A dharma talk offered by Ian Kido Case at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn in January is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Mountain Village and Capital City: Audio Dharma Talk by Kidō Ian Case (2023/01/14/)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

New audio dharma by Chymio Atkinson

A dharma talk offered by Chimyo Simone Atkinson at Boundless Mind Temple in Brooklyn in early February is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

Choosing Kindness: Audio Dharma Talk by Chimyo Atkinson (2023/02/04)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

January at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple: A Month in Photographs

Each month, we’ll be sharing photographs of life at Sōshinji, Ancestral Heart Zen Temple. All Brooklyn Zen Center members are warmly invited to come practice here, and to experience Zen monastic training. Please email ahdirector@brooklynzen.org for more information. 

January was a time of transitions and change at Sōshinji. This was the first month that Kosen Sensei and Laura Sensei were not present at the temple, as they devoted themselves to caring for Kosen Sensei as he received cancer treatment. We concentrated our hearts on them and their well-being as we cared for the temple and for each other. And as we honored our grief and fear, we also cultivated joy and play. Here are some sweet moments from this month.

We stepped into new roles this month: Former Tenzo Kaishin (left) is now Tsusu (Director) and former Shika Don (right) is now Tenzo (Head of the Kitchen). 

Here is Lokha (left) pounding rice into mochi. Wesley (middle) built our temple’s first kine (wooden mallet) out of scraps in the garage, and we had our inaugural mochitsuki (mochi making) tradition for New Year’s. It worked!!!

The garden crew and work leader worked hard to clear the fire pit, and we celebrated our Shissui (work leader) Emme’s birthday with a fire.

Our friends at Sokoji—the temple that first invited Suzuki Roshi to America, and a foundation of Soto Zen and the Japanese American community in San Francisco—sent us this calendar as a New Year’s gift. We are deeply grateful to be forming a relationship with them. Back row, left to right: Wesley, Kaishin, Jeff, Rachel, Emme, and Don. Front row, left to right: Ryan and Weishin.

During our daily afternoon break, the kitchen offers rice cakes, apples, peanut butter, and jam, which we call “backdoor snack,” as they do at Tassajara. Jeff has been expounding the true dharma through backdoor snack art.

Faith and Liberation: A Community Conversation on Prison Abolition

Image: Second Shot, a short film by Andrew Michael Ellis

A three-part in-person conversation series:

  • Event dates: Wednesdays 2/8, 3/22, 4/19
  • Event time: 6:30 to 8:15pm EST
  • Location: Christ Church Cobble Hill, located at 326 Clinton Street (at the corner of Kane Street).

These multi-faith community conversations will explore the concept of prison abolition, and how our Buddhist practice and the Christian faith traditions relate to it. Prison abolition is not simply a movement that looks to close all prisons, it seeks to reimagine justice in a system that discriminates so heavily toward poor people of color, and to address the hyper-funding of the police and military industrial complex at the expense of important community resources, like housing and healthcare. Furthermore, prison abolition demands that we consider the way that our carceral system influences and shows up in our personal life.

This series of dialogues between the Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC) and Christ Church Cobble Hill communities is a practice building community along lines of religious difference while using these interactions to reflect more deeply on what it means to be practitioners in our respective traditions.

Each evening, we will screen a documentary and then have a discussion which will be led by practitioners of each religion. For 2/8 and 3/22 conversations, we will explore prison abolition and mass incarceration, and for the 4/19 conversation, we will explore various efforts that prison abolitionists are involved in.

These conversations are part of Odyssey Impact, a network of faith-based communities, congregations, faith leaders, seminarians, and secular partners, which seeks to drive social change through innovative storytelling and media, and this opportunity came about through Union Theological Seminary, where BZC dharma teacher Kosen Greg Snyder is the Senior Director of Buddhist Studies.

BZC EoY Appeal: One More Day to Give and Two-Thirds There!

We have one day to go and we’ve raised $65,803 toward our End of Year campaign—just under two-thirds of our goal.

Please donate today to help us reach our goal of $100,000!

Dana, generosity, is one of the many ways we come together as a community. Your support ensures that the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha are available to all, and that we enter 2023 with the resources to meet each person where they are.

Thank you for considering a gift.

Image: Throwing Flower Petals at the End of Rohatsu Sesshin, December 2022
For more images of BZC‘s life during the past year, see 2022 at BZC: A Year in Pictures

Four Days Left: Campaign Update

We’ve raised $56,897 toward our End of Year campaign. This collective effort has come from over 90 individual donors, with dozens of sangha members phone banking and emailing. With just four days to go, we are over halfway to our goal of $100,000.

Still, we are asking for 100 percent participation of the sangha in this final stretch. Would you be able to donate today to help us reach our goal?

As Sarah and Charlie Senseis wrote in their recent message to the sangha: “We deeply appreciate the mandala of support which keeps our doors open, bells ringing, lights on and hearts warm through your myriad contributions. Financial support is one vital piece of caring for the life of practice at BZC, fostering its liberative potentials, and maintaining our places of practice in Brooklyn, Millerton and online.”

Thank you for considering a gift today that will bring benefit to all beings.

With gratitude and appreciation,

Ryan Lee Wong
Administrative Director, Brooklyn Zen Center

Actualizing the Mandala of Support

Dear Sangha,

We are writing to ask you to contribute to Brooklyn Zen Center‘s end-of-year campaign. We have long valued the efforts in dharma and justice unfolding at BZC, and it has been a great joy for us to dive headlong into the Sangha since moving to Brooklyn in June. We have been thoroughly welcomed and deeply supported to offer ourselves as teachers, and we look forward to continuing to meet all of you, deepen our connections, and walk together in Dharma friendship.

We have just finished a wonderful Rohatsu sesshin held at Boundless Mind Temple as the culmination of our fall practice period, an intensive 5-day ritual of repose and bliss, engagement and liberation. In our collective teaching offerings, we have particularly focused on rest as integral to a more humane, compassionate, and sustainable life of engagement and liberative function. Instead of being a stepping out of engagement, we join in the collective reimagining of rest as a pause in the midst of whatever is happening—to make deeper contact and connection with self and others; rest as a reclaiming of humanity in the face of enculturated systems of dehumanization.

We deeply appreciate the mandala of support which keeps our doors open, bells ringing, lights on and hearts warm through your myriad contributions. Financial support is one vital piece of caring for the life of practice at BZC, fostering its liberative potentials, and maintaining our places of practice in Brooklyn, Millerton and online. We are asking for you to offer whatever amount you can. We are also striving to reach the goal of 100% participation from our membership. And for those who are not members and value the practice, your gifts are essential as well.

All true liberative practice is collective and communal. Supporting BZC in this campaign is a way to nurture a place in the world where people gather to work towards actualizing and embodying this reality.  May we all ensure the great work and great rest of our Sangha activity continues, deepens, thrives and revolutionizes!

With love and profound gratitude,

Sarah and Charlie
Dharma Teachers

Inclining Our Hearts: A Message from Kidō Ian Case

Dear Shanga,

This time of year in the Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC) calendar—the interim period between Rohatsu and the beginning of the new year—has always had a particular texture for me. The fall practice period has just ended and there are a couple weeks before our regular programming resumes in January. I experience this as a wondrous time of stillness and potential. My karmic patterns seem to stand out in stark relief, illuminated by the teachings and engagement of the practice period and the effort brought forth in the Rohatsu retreat.

During the break, there is always the risk that I will simply fall back on my conditioning and succumb to its comfort and familiarity, which I have so often confused with ease and with rest.  At the same time, my own intentions still resonate, the teachings are close at hand, and I can still feel into the collective intentions of the sangha towards awakening. I have the wonderful possibility to make another choice at this moment, to incline my heart toward liberation and away from separation.

This year’s Rohatsu retreat felt especially poignant and powerful for me. It was the first Rohatsu in many years that Kosen and Laura did not lead. It also marked the one-year anniversary of our reopening of Boundless Mind Temple and the six-month anniversary of Sarah and Charlie Senseis’ arrival in Brooklyn. I had the opportunity to co-lead the retreat with them, to give a dharma talk and to meet students in practice discussion. This new vantage point only deepened my appreciation for the sincerity of practice in this community and gave me a visceral sense of amazing potential that is revealed when the sangha comes together in presence.

Our End of Year Campaign is of course another such opportunity for us to come together and manifest a collective intention—to support the community and BZC’s mission of liberation for all beings. In the same way that realization isn’t actualized without practice (or that we can’t have wind without fanning), we need each of us to contribute to this effort for it to do its work.

So far we have raised $42,463 toward our goal of $100,000. Please consider making a gift today. May we celebrate this opportunity to incline our hearts towards peace and awakening, towards sangha. Together we can do this.

With gratitude,

Kidō Ian Case
Brooklyn Zen Center Tanto (Head of Practice)

New audio dharma talk by Charlie Korin Pokorny

A new audio dharma talk offered by Charlie Korin Pokorny during the recent Rohatsu Sesshin is now available on the BZC Audio Dharma Podcast.

The Dharma Gate of Repose and Bliss: Audio Dharma talk by Charlie Korin Pokorny (2022/12/10)

The BZC Audio Dharma Podcast is offered free of charge and made possible by the donations we receive. A $10 suggested donation per dharma talk is recommended. You can donate to BZC here. Thank you for your generosity!

Culminating 2022 Ango Weekly Message: Freedom and Liberation

Image: Tsherin Sherpa’s painting from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco (please check out his work at the link here…it’s wondrous)

A weekly message from dharma teachers Sarah Dōjin Emerson and Charlie Korin Pokorny in support of the 2022 Fall Practice Period.

I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice.

May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs. May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future – may it bring words we don’t know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.
– Bayo Akomolafe from his website

Beloved Sangha,

We have come to what appears to be the end of this Ango, this Peaceful Abiding, together this fall at BZC. So we have come to the beginning of exploring how everything we have taken up now has time to percolate, infiltrate, nurture, inform and hopefully alter our lives in the direction of liberation.

For this final week, and for the rest of our lives and lifetimes to come, we invite us all to take up the practice of liberation, of freedom. It may sound like a lofty invitation- to engage freedom and liberation- but look for the ways this engagement is available right now, and right now, and right now.

What did we learn about freedom and liberation in our early lives? What were the archetypes? What were the images? And how do we hold and engage freedom and liberation now? How has the Dharma seeped into you? And how has this shaped how you engage freedom and liberation?

Take your time with all of these questions, and let what you find be as spacious as you can imagine.

May there be joy in your efforts.

May there be rest and nourishment.

May there be play.

May there be radical, life-affirming bouts of transformative imagination that change you and shape the world around you, for the benefit of everyone you encounter and many beyond your perception who you’ll never even know.

And, maybe most importantly, may this Ango help sow into each of us a clarity that liberation only occurs in concert with all things, even in the tiniest and most seemingly personal of moments. That, like Shakyamuni Buddha, every awakening only happens together with all beings.

And in this, may we take refuge in Sangha.

May we take refuge in Dharma.

May we take refuge in Buddha.

My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free- in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from the fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant. She simply wanted us to live through our third eye, and see life as possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world free of patriarchy, a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a more expansive, fluid, “cosmos-politan” definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.
Robin D. G. Kelley, from Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Please care for yourself, one another and all beings as we participate together towards freedom.

With bows and with love,
Sarah & Charlie