Zen Community of Oregon Dharma Talks

Jogen continues his exploration of karma, focusing on how habitual actions and desires can shape our lives and lead us away from ultimate peace. He explores atonement, the cultivation of skillful actions, and ultimately the possibility of becoming free from karmic patterns by resting in awareness and responding from a deeper place of choice. 

Bansho explores patience as one of the six paramitas, a practice that helps us meet ourselves, others, and the changing circumstances of life with presence and curiosity. Through meditation and everyday relationships, patience becomes less about waiting for things to change and more about learning to respond with wisdom, compassion, and steadiness.

Jogen explores karma as the ongoing relationship between our actions, habits, and experience, emphasizing that practice gives us freedom in how we respond to the results of past actions. Drawing on the Buddha’s teachings, including the Salt Crystal Sutta, he invites us to meet difficult patterns with greater awareness, spaciousness, and curiosity.

Threaded through this talk by Bansho Sensei is the tension between wanting recognition for helping others and the practice of "not expecting applause." It frames true generosity as releasing the need to be thanked or acknowledged. It distinguishes ordinary impatience (wanting the red light to change) from a deeper "Dharma patience" of truly being with others and with our own discomfort.

Centered on the idea of "futuring" or craving, this talk by Hogen Roshi examines how the mind actively shapes an infinite, formless world into a narrow personal story through wanting. It suggests liberation comes from noticing this shaping process rather than being unconsciously driven by it.

This talk by Hogen Roshi explores craving as the mind's habitual grasping — "I want, I want" — and how it quietly generates most of our dissatisfaction. It contrasts two retreat experiences, agony and freedom, to show that both can lead to the same insight once we stop resisting and sink beneath the thought.

This talk by Hogen Roshi unpacks a traditional chant on "blessings" by redefining the word away from divine reward and toward human capacity. It centers on discernment — recognizing foolish paths to happiness versus wise ones — and treats association with wisdom as something actively built, not passively found.

Using poetry, koans, and personal story, this talk paints practice as a slow accumulation of intimacy with the world — with fear, with joy, with the earth itself. It closes on the idea that these encounters don't disappear when we leave formal practice; they continue quietly shaping how we sit, dream, and live.

This talk Kisei explores practice as homecoming — returning to a natural ease we knew as children but lost through striving and adulthood. A folk tale and the Buddha's own reflections before awakening sre explored forgetting and remembering as central to the spiritual path. 

This talk explores what it means to listen beyond the ears — to the earth, to silence, to a mind not bound by self and asks whether the boundary between "sentient" and "insentient" is one we've simply mistaken for the truth.