Zencare Podcast

“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.

“Our practice doesn't ask us how to end wars, it asks us where the wars begin. In this body. In this flash of rage. In this certainty that I am right and you are wrong.”

Amid news of global conflicts and war, Chodo Sensei offers a profound reflection on the second Buddhist precept: do not steal. But what does stealing mean when the world is organized around taking; lives, safety, homes, childhood, trust, and ultimately, humanity itself?

Drawing on Suzuki Roshi's teaching about entering the Buddha Hall with clean feet and the classic Zen story of the samurai and the master, Chodo explores how war begins long before bombs fall. It begins when we steal each other's humanity through language that turns people into targets, grief into statistics, and suffering into abstraction. It begins in the mind that divides the world into “us and them.”

With students sheltering from bombs in multiple countries, this isn't abstract philosophy, it's an urgent question: How do we sit with the sorrow of the world without collapsing into it? How do we notice our own anger without weaponizing it? How do we refuse to let suffering become something “out there” that we're not part of?

“When you encounter obstacles, do not see them as hindrances separate from practice.”

In this talk from the beginning of the year (and in preparation for the Year of the Fire Horse), Koshin Sensei reflects on what it really means to make effort. Not as self-improvement, but as a vow to be fully here.

Drawing on Dōgen’s teachings on continuous practice, he offers simple, direct questions we can live inside: How are you using your time? How are you caring for your body, (the personal and the collective)? Do your investments of time, finances, energy, etc. support what you say you value? And can you meet obstacles not as interruptions, but as the very field of practice?

This talk is both grounding and bracing: a reminder that practice and realization are not separate, that there’s no “arrival,” and the most honest measure of our practice might be how the people around us experience it.

With humor and warmth, Koshin invites us to return, again and again, to uprightness in this moment, and to a life shaped less by habit energy and more by vow.

“Many people can study lots of things, but are you living that way?”

On the 12th day of our Commit to Sit, during a winter blizzard, Koshin Sensei explores a profound question: What's the difference between talking about spiritual practice and actually living it?

Drawing on teachings from Suzuki Roshi and the 13th-century Zen master Dogen, Koshin examines how we often get caught in our thoughts; arguing with teachers in our minds, feeding our sense of entitlement, constantly debating whether we're “doing it right.”

But what would it be like to simply be ourselves, our ordinary selves, without all that noise?

At the heart of this talk is the concept of “transmission” from teacher to student, not as something claimed or awarded, but as something shown through how we live. Koshin asks us to consider: Do we practice only when it's convenient? Do we use spirituality as an identity or a lifestyle brand rather than a lived commitment? And perhaps most importantly: How do we practice when we're alone, when no one is watching?

Koshin also reflects on his own struggles with “why not me?” and shares Dogen's wisdom about safeguarding genuine practice in a world that makes it easy to dilute or neglect.