Editor's Note(s): Just a few weeks ago, Jisho Siebert, teacher at Zen Fields in Ames, Iowa offered the first guest-teacher dharma talk for our summer Commit to Sit. It's an incredibly refreshing take on a classic Zen story which you may have heard a number of times and we are glad to share it with you here.

Alongside it, we are very delighted to announce our three Fall courses are now open for registration, the first of which features the guest teacher herself:

• The Diamond Sutra: Offering Care Without Grasping with Jisho Siebert
• Catch Your Mind: How to Live in a World on Fire with Koshin Sensei
• Living an Ethical Life: A Study of the Zen Precepts with both Koshin Sensei and Chodo Sensei

Now, a bit more about Jisho's moving talk...

“I found this story really annoying for a long time.”

That's how Jisho Siebert opens her exploration of one of Zen's most famous teaching stories, the tale of Master Hakuin, falsely accused of fathering a child, who responds only with “Is that so?” When the truth is revealed a year later and the baby is returned, he says the same three words again.

On the surface, it's a story about equanimity. But Jisho invites us to slow down and ask the questions the story leaves out: What was this like for the young woman? For the baby, separated after a year of bonding? For the fish market worker who never came forward? For the parents, the villagers, the storytellers who passed this down, erasing women's perspectives along the way?

Drawing on decades of crisis response and violence prevention work, Jisho shows how equanimity in action looks like curiosity instead of judgment, questions instead of arguments, and fierce care that doesn't collapse into either passivity or reactivity.

When the whole fabric of a community shifts (as it does for those involved in this classic tale) so does the experience of those within it. There's no one who isn't involved, so how can we act like it?

Editor's Note: In celebration of Commit to Sit starting this week and Chodo sensei's birthday last week, we share his talk from this past Winter Commit to Sit. Enjoy and may it offer some comfort and guidance for you.

‍In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei asks a deceptively simple question: Without a vow, how do you live?

Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching on great effort, Chodo explores what a vow actually is while also reflecting on 36 years of sobriety and three decades of Zen practice, both sustained not by certainty but by a simple, sometimes shaky turning. A vow taken one breath, one moment at a time.



In our daily practice at NYZC, we can see certain unreachable vows at work. The Bodhisattva vows that we chant: “sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them” or “the Buddha way is unattainable, I vow to attain it”. Together we promise to walk, even though it is unlikely we will arrive at any destination.



In times of outrage, fear, grief, and numbness, Chodo reminds us that we can return to our vows. Even when we fail, even when we fall short, there is a direction to our lives.

With some guidance and help from good spiritual friends, we understand the gap between how we're living and how we aspire to live is our unique (and universal) place of practice.

Editor's Note: In honor of our Commit to Sit practice period starting July 1st and our Wholehearted Sesshin (silent retreat) in August, we share this opening talk from the first night of both our Winter Commit to Sit and our Winter Sesshin in January. May it serve you!

In this opening talk, Koshin Sensei invites us to consider how the very places where we suffer can become gateways into deeper intimacy with life.

Drawing on the story of a potter who transformed his relationship to fire after being badly burned, Koshin reflects on courage, practice, and the ways we often use suffering to separate ourselves from others rather than meet the world more fully.

As the sangha entered a period of study with Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s Becoming Yourself (the guiding text for the last Commit to Sit), Koshin reminds us that practice is not a self-improvement project. It is about releasing our fixation on fixing, meeting life directly, and taking responsibility for how we show up in thought, word, and action.

Through teachings from Shakyamuni Buddha, Prajnatara, Bodhidharma, Rujing, Dogen, and Suzuki Roshi, this talk points toward a practice of immediacy, intimacy, and rigorous honesty: becoming our true selves for the benefit of all beings, including those who will inherit this practice long after we are gone.

“How you bow is not just for you.”

In this recent dharma talk, Koshin Sensei reflects on what it means to practice consistently: to be the same person regardless of who's watching, what conditions you're in, or whether you're getting what you want.

Drawing on Dogen Zenji's teaching on the Four Embracing Actions (giving, loving speech, beneficial action, and identity action), Koshin explores what should remain unchangeable in practice and what needs to adapt as NYZC prepares for a major transition.

At the core is a distinction borrowed from teacher Aoyama Roshi: Fu'eki, what must not change (the practice of freeing ourselves from small self and habitual mind), and Ryuko, what can evolve to meet the moment.

What are the things in your practice and your life that must not change? And what might you need to change in yourself to allow practice to enter you?

“The precept does not ask us to be passive in the face of injustice. The question is always: from what place do we speak?”

In this recent talk, Chodo Sensei explores the sixth and seventh precepts: not speaking of others’ faults and errors, and not elevating oneself while blaming others.

What can seem like simple teachings become a profound invitation to examine the energy beneath our speech. Are we speaking from compassion, clarity, and care? Or from reactivity, self-protection, and the need to be right?

With honesty (and more than a touch of humor), Chodo reflects on how quickly the mind moves toward comparison, judgment, and disparagement, and how this habit creates suffering for ourselves and others. The practice, he reminds us, is not to suppress truth or avoid difficult conversations, but to slow down, look at our motivations, and learn to speak in ways that are true, timely, kind, and beneficial.

This is the work of becoming “that which we already are”; people capable of finding the Buddha in one another, especially those who challenge us most. 

“The purpose of practice might be to enter the question so fully that it begins to reshape us.”

What is the purpose of practice after all? In this talk on doubt and the practice of not-knowing, Chodo Sensei shares a teaching from his favorite Zen teacher: Zen Master Raven, the wise old bird from Robert Aitken Roshi's animal sangha stories.

When Badger asks what the purpose of practice is, Raven doesn't answer directly. Instead, he asks: “Do you have an inkling?” When Badger hesitates and says “I'm not sure,” Raven responds: “Doubts dig up the whole blue planet.”

Rather than treating doubt as something to overcome or push away, Chodo invites us to embrace it. Can you live with the doubt? Can you doubt the doubt? Can you feel it in the body rather than trying to answer it from the head?

The talk and teaching is about letting doubt do its work of digging, of opening, of uncovering what's been with us all along, waiting for us to stop long enough to feel it.

“In Zen practice, we talk about bearing witness; not as a passive act, but as a form of deep engagement. To really see what's happening. Not escaping into numbness, but also not hardening into fixed views.”

In this recent talk, Chodo sensei reflects on the fourth and fifth precepts (truthfulness and not clouding the mind) as practices for living in a fractured and overwhelming world.

Speaking to the instability, violence, and uncertainty of our current moment, he invites us to notice the ways we reach for certainty, numbness, outrage, or distraction when the truth feels too much to bear.

But what can we do when we are stuck in the “sh*t show” (a term Chodo would never use)? He offers bearing witness as a courageous and compassionate response: staying close to what is true, pausing long enough to discern clearly, and meeting the world without adding confusion to confusion. 

“In this moment, what does it mean to care?”

What do the precepts ask of us in a time of injustice, division, and outrage?

In this recent talk, given the day after millions took to the streets in protest across the US, Chodo Sensei reflects on anger, activism, and the thin line between harm and care.

Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching that we don't observe precepts to attain enlightenment but to actualize Buddha's spirit, Chodo explores how the precepts are not commandments that remove us from the world and this very moment, but rather invitations to meet both with intimacy.

He reminds us that our practice isn't about perfection. It's about noticing when we're about to cross that line from care to harm in our minds, our words, our actions. It's about letting one question interrupt us, shape our lives: In this moment, what does it mean to care?

“Faith is not blind belief, but confidence born of seeing what's actually possible—the willingness to plant a seed without yet seeing the fruit.”

In this recent talk given on a snowy Sunday morning, Koshin Sensei explores the Buddha's teaching on three forms of generosity: giving out of faith, material generosity, and the gift of fearlessness (abhaya dana).

Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's gardening metaphor, Koshin asks: Are you just planting a seed and walking away, or are you tending to it day after day? Do you evaluate your practice after one visit, one year, even ten years or do you give yourself fully to the ongoing work of showing up?

Koshin also reflects on his own journey: after ten years of steady practice, he realized he was still deeply self-involved, lazy in zazen, and “one of those people you wouldn't want over for dinner”; lecturing everyone about veganism and Buddhism until a friend finally told him, “you're being an asshole.” Real friendship, real generosity, means being willing to say it like it is out of love, not just making people feel good.

At the heart of this talk is a question about faith. Not blind belief, but the willingness to plant a seed without knowing what will grow. Can you give yourself fully to this moment, whatever it brings? Can you offer steadiness in times of your own panic? And most importantly: Are you taking care of the garden every day, whether that be your practice, your relationships, your mind, your sangha, your heart and the hearts of others?

“Do an audit of how you spend your money. Does it match what you say you really care about?”

In this powerful recent talk, Koshin Sensei tackles a topic many spiritual communities avoid: money. Often, topics like finances and business can be deemed “not spiritual”, but does it have to be so?

Drawing on Suzuki Roshi and the Buddha's teachings on generosity (dana), Koshin explores how money is simply another form of impermanence. When it circulates, there's vitality. When it freezes, whether through fear, scarcity thinking, or the belief that “I don't have enough”, there's suffering.

Reflecting on 19 years of building the New York Zen Center, starting with $200 a month in payroll and a smelly room behind a hospital, Koshin invites us to examine our relationship with giving. Do you give freely, or with a closed fist? Does your bank statement match what you say you care about?

This isn't about guilt or shoulds–it's about recognizing that the tight fist is exhausting, while freely giving is not. Whether you have $1 or $100,000, the practice is the same: widening the circle in your own mind, including generosity in your life, and understanding that what you give today allows someone to practice decades from now.