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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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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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, given on the eve of Hiroshima’s anniversary, Sensei Kodo sits with how easily the mind justifies what it later regrets: “It’s very disturbing, isn’t it?… The beauty of science and of discovering truth and of imagining realities that we just can’t conceive, then being co-opted by just the greed, hatred, and delusion of our minds.” Kodo turns to Einstein’s…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Roshi Norma Wong, a Zen priest of Native Hawaiian and Hakka Chinese descent, offers a Zen and indigenous perspective on spirituality and governance. Norma grounds the talk in an unbroken relationship to place and lineage, opening with the Hawaiian chant E Ho Mai, calling in the ancestors and declaring: “There is no human on the face of the Earth who was not…

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In this session of The Measure of Our Humanity series, Roshi Joan Halifax opens with a guided meditation grounded in stability, breath, and the bodhisattva’s aspiration to meet suffering with mercy and care, before introducing Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi. In the main session, Bhikkhu Bodhi explores what he calls the “world-sustaining Dharma” — the moral order that Buddhist teaching asks us to bring…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Senseis Kodo and Dainin join Roshi Joan Halifax as she explores what it means to live and take refuge in spiritual community. Drawing on decades of building and residing in community herself, she traces valences of the three jewels — Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha — to their most human dimensions. Refuge, she suggests, is not rest in the ideal alone…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Koshin Flint Sparks takes up an old question posed to the Buddha’s disciple Mahakaccana: what drives our conflicts? Mahakaccana answers that conflict arises from our attachment, adherence, fixation, addiction, obsession, and holding firm to our personal views and pleasures. Koshin answers the same question, borrowing language from Joko Beck’s four-line practice…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Genryu Clayton Dalton — emergency physician and novice priest — draws on stories from his hospital work to explore how we can meet suffering without turning away from it. Memories of long-ago encounters in the ER, returned to and turned over again, have become a kind of teacher: moments of violence, grief, and quiet tenderness witnessed at the bedside…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Butsumon Tuck Stibich describes teaching the GRACE program — Roshi Joan’s framework for compassionate action — to a class of cadets training as correctional officers. Butsumon admits to having judgments and expectations going into the training, and his surprise when cadets explained their reasons for being there: faith, family, and a wish to give others the…

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In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, delivered on the eve of the 15th anniversary of her twin sister Ellie’s passing, novice priest Jimon Lorene Flaming tenderly opens the bittersweet space of her sister’s life and death. Jimon traces Ellie’s path — a woman who lived entirely on her own terms, spending her life in nature, deeply embodied, trusting the flow of life — and the shock of losing not…

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