Zencare Podcast

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.