Zen is an amalgamation of Buddhism and Daoism. But which way around: is it a Buddhism with a Daoist inflection, or a Daoism reinventing itself through a Buddhist lens? The question is practical. Zen can be sparse on how zazen translates into everyday life, as if appropriate action would simply fall into place once we sit hard enough. The Daoist stories have more to say. In the Zhuangzi, a cook's blade stays sharp for nineteen years because it follows the inherent structure of the ox; a swimmer navigates the white-water torrent with ease, following the course of the water without making a private one of his own. Appropriate action depends on a mind that perceives the patterns of a situation—its structure as well as its dynamic. There is much to be learned from the Daoist views on how the skill of discerning and acting in accord with these patterns can be cultivated.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

We're pleased to announce that Uji – Being-Time, a new self-paced course taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.

The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi.

Receive 30% off through July 24 with the code UJI30. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

To be alive is to have problems. While having problems is unpleasant, the deeper difficulty, this talk proposes, is not the problems themselves but the resistance we bring to them. Suffering is not one thing; it is pain multiplied by resistance. Beginning with the Five Remembrances and their reminder that aging, illness, death, and the loss of what we love cannot be escaped, the talk turns to the feelings we least want to feel, taking anxiety and powerlessness as the examples, and asks what it would mean to stop organizing our lives around their avoidance. Zazen offers the training ground: learning, in Suzuki Roshi's phrase, to sit with painful legs without being disturbed by them, then carrying that capacity into the disturbances that arise off the cushion. Reading a section of Being-Time (Uji), where Dogen links change itself, any change, with glorious golden radiance, the talk suggests that our challenge is to find aliveness even within our most unwanted feelings and states of mind. They also belong.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

We're pleased to announce that Uji – Being-Time, a new self-paced course taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is now available! Through a line-by-line commentary on Dogen's Uji (Being-Time)—one of the most profound texts in the Zen tradition—Zenki Roshi brings these teachings into everyday life with clear guidance and practical suggestions for practice.

The course includes an introductory talk, nine modules of commentary, practice suggestions, a concluding talk on daily-life practice, text translations, video and audio recordings, written study materials, lifetime access, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi.

Special introductory offer: Receive 30% off through July 24 with the code UJI30. Learn more and enroll here: https://www.boulderzen.org/being-time-self-paced-course

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given the day before a Bodhisattva Precepts Ceremony (Jukai) for five members of the Boulder Zen Center sangha. After describing the ceremony's lineage papers and the intentional family one joins by receiving the precepts, the talk turns to a difficulty. The grave precepts tend to land as a should, like a parental commandment, in what the talk calls the "structure of should," a morally superior part instructing a guilty one. This structure divides us within ourselves and, in the same movement, from other people, and it offers no freedom. The only door is to discover that—underneath our delusions and superficial desires—we already want what the precepts ask. In Zen the precepts are expressions of the awakening mind. It’s the soft, resonant, kind mind that arises through zazen, where interdependence is felt rather than thought. Because we inevitably lose this mind, the talk takes up trust and repentance, the latter understood as melting rather than self-punishment. It closes by observing that enacting this mind also asks for learned adult skills, not spontaneity alone, and encourages receiving the ceremony as a door into trusting one's own awakening mind.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given at a One-Day Sitting at the Boulder Zen Center in partnership with Dharma Gates, an organization dedicated to opening pathways into formal meditation practice for young adults. The talk's central concern, however, reaches well beyond any one stage of life. It begins from the etymology of satisfaction—Latin satis (enough) and facere (to make)—and frames meditation as the practice of letting what is here be enough. Set against this is the recognition that our culture functions as a dissatisfaction machine: an economy that must grow, technology that must improve, advertising that manufactures needs we did not know we had, screens whose scroll generates comparison with lives far from our own. Anxious becoming is the felt shape of life organized around a hopefully better future. The point is not to negate the challenges that arise in different arenas of life—work, relationships, meaning, spiritual path—but to shift the ground from which they are met. "Just now is enough" relocates the present as one's whole experiential field in which one is already breathing and functioning. From there, the next step does not have to be forced; it unfolds.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was given during a zazen intensive at the Boulder Zen Center. The talk holds a question often left unasked: what is the role of vow in Zen practice? It opens with a confession of skepticism. Vow can become superego, a new identity to monitor against. The talk works through this tension by tracing how way-seeking mind emerges from the friction of misrepresenting ourselves as substantial, separate selves within a reality that is undivided activity. Just sitting already contains the dynamic of practice: a backward step into undifferentiated awareness and a forward step into responsive engagement. Vow's role is not to add discipline on top of this. It is to keep reconnecting practice to way-seeking mind, because for most of us its felt urgency is not consistently present.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk is about how aliveness wants to unfold through our life process. It opens with the question of what it means to find an activity that expresses one's aliveness (for example gardening), and how to widen it so it can inform all of life's activities. The talk names five unfoldings of a "realizational life": aliveness, order, expression, form, and Way. Each requires the practitioner's awake participation; none can be skipped or forced. The talk also names three ways aliveness can be displaced rather than expressed in the present: deferral into the future, nostalgia, and longing for an imagined other life. A turning word is offered for each. The talk closes on the practice that holds the whole movement together—noticing where one actually is and meeting that place fully. To be awake to the unfolding is already a realizational life.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was offered on Day 3 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center, continuing the investigation of mind begun the previous day (published two weeks ago). The inquiry turns to the koan exchange between Damei and Matsu: "What is Buddha?" – "This very mind is Buddha." Dogen warns that students have misunderstood this teaching in two ways. The first error is to equate Buddha with the ordinary functioning of mind—thinking, feeling, perceiving—which leads to complacency: if I'm already Buddha, why practice? The second error is subtler, taking the field of awareness as an eternal soul or spiritual essence that stands behind and survives the passing show of experience. Both errors are forms of grasping. In one we grasp the contents of mind, in the other we grasp the field itself. The solution Dogen points toward is not a third thing to grasp but a release from grasping altogether. When Dogen says "the mind is mountains, rivers, and earth," he is not pointing to something behind experience but to full inhabitation of form, both liberation and a more complete entry into the world as living, dynamic appearance.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

The self-paced course Developing Embodiment, taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, is now available. The course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a complimentary practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. It explores what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment can support a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. Learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk was offered on Day 2 of the Spring Sesshin at the Boulder Zen Center. It takes up a classic koan exchange: “What is the wondrous clear mind?” – “Mountains, rivers, and the earth. The sun, the moon, and stars.” The talk invites practitioners to investigate where the mind is located in their own experience, moving through a progression: from the familiar default of a private chamber behind the eyes, to attention merged with breath traveling through the body, to the senses opening outward until the visual field, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations all become part of a field of mind. The questions “What is the mind?” or “Where is the mind?”, asked in a Buddhist context, are not just philosophical but probe which views of the mind support or hinder liberation. A distinction between the contents and the field of mind is necessary but can lead to subtle forms of dualism. This is countered by the teaching of emptiness, which reveals the mind to be not a static expanse but a dynamic, ungraspable mystery and the self to be a moment-to-moment expression. This is what makes the mind “wondrous."

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

We are excited to announce that the self-paced course, Developing Embodiment, is available! Taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, this course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. You'll investigate what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment supports a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. You can learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

This talk is from the Practice Course "Developing Embodiment," originally offered live at the Boulder Zen Center and now available as a self-paced course. It challenges a common assumption, that ethics is a luxury, something we attend to once our basic needs are met. Drawing on evolutionary perspectives, the talk suggests the opposite: cooperation and care are existential facts for human beings, built into our very survival as a species. Compassion, then, is not a virtue we impose on ourselves but a capacity we already have. The Sanskrit root of compassion, karuna, means something like "to be shaken" or "to quiver"—a bodily experience. We are stirred by the presence of others, moved by their suffering, drawn out by what we encounter. The talk explores how this resonance is rooted in openness rather than contraction, and how being moved is not a problem to solve but a capacity to inhabit. The practice is to notice when we contract and to open again. The talk also addresses how, in a world with so much suffering, we can relate to our compassionate impulses without shutting down.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

We are excited to announce that the self-paced course, Developing Embodiment, is now available! Taught by Zenki Dillo Roshi, this course includes six dharma talks, eighteen practice suggestions, and a free practice meeting with Zenki Roshi. You'll investigate what it means to live fully in and through the body, and how embodiment supports a path of freedom from suffering, wisdom, and compassion. You can learn more and access the course here: https://www.boulderzen.org/developing-embodiment-self-paced

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.

Zazen reveals how much of our mental struggle is bound up with time. The future presses in as plans, goals, and ideals of what we or the world should become. The past returns as memory, justification, and attempts to reinterpret difficult experiences—often in the service of protecting an image of who we are. In a psychological approach, we might be guided to explain and rearrange our story in healthier ways. In meditation practice, however, when the past resurfaces, it becomes an opportunity to complete what wasn’t fully lived. Completion is not perfect resolution. It is meeting a situation fully and openly. This can change our view of time altogether. Rather than an abstract series of points, time is the dynamic of living situations asking to be met and completed.

Welcome to Zen Mind! 

Our annual Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is well underway. Practice Periods are guided by Zenki Roshi together with members of the Practice Council. The 2026 Practice Period emphasizes the study of Dōgen’s fascicle Being-Time (Uji). Learn more here: https://www.boulderzen.org/practice-period-2026

Following the Practice Period, a full commentary on Being-Time (Uji) will be offered later this summer as a self-paced course. To be notified when it launches, please join our mailing list.

Love the dharma talks and want to hear more? Consider becoming a Premium Podcast subscriber for only $9/month. Dive deeper into the topics through Q&A sessions related to each of the talks. You can even ask questions of your own through the 'Ask Me Anything' platform and gain access to previously unpublished talks from intensives. Learn more here: https://zenmind.supercast.com/

If you're enjoying these talks, please subscribe and leave us a rating or review!

See all events and join our mailing list at www.boulderzen.org. Email us at [email protected].

Zenki Christian Dillo Roshi is the the guiding teacher at the Boulder Zen Center in Colorado, USA. This podcast shares the regular dharma talks given at the center. Zenki Roshi approaches Zen practice as a craft of transformation, liberation, wisdom and compassionate action. His interest is to bring Buddhism alive within the Western cultural context, while staying committed to the traditional emphasis on embodiment.