*transcript produced by AI Welcome, everybody, and thank you for practicing today. I’m excited to start exploring this new open door zen sutra book with you as we kind of figure out our way of moving through the ritual service. And now we’re here for Dharma discussion. I think, Cass, you said you had something…
A cutting exploration of not-self, volition, and compassion. Liberation is lived integrity, not found in the palliative consolation of “being.”
Exploring how equanimity can blur boundaries, how precepts guide action, and how Buddhism reframes “Self” beyond Atman into dynamic suchness.
An open forum exploring practice vs. meditation, intimacy with life, and the spectrum of awakening, with lived examples from music, parenting, and the subtle art of appropriateness.
This session follows the final verses of Chapter 2.IX, with sustained attention to Yogācāra’s account of karmic appearance and the structure of mind-only experience. The painter and ocean metaphors are unpacked to show how perception arises from perfumed seeds and mistaken construction. A discussion of Bodhidharma’s Two Entrances is used to clarify how early Zen aligned with the Laṅkāvatāra—not philosophically, but functionally—through direct realization of mind. “Suchness” is handled without reification, and teachings are presented as conditional rather than final. The session closes without synthesis, keeping attention on how language, perception, and practice co-arise.
In this talk, we explore the Lankāvatāra’s vision of karma and perception as wave-like processes, uncovering how consciousness, grasping, and memory generate karmic entanglement—and how release becomes possible through non-possession.
This was written several years ago, primarily as personal notes and as a quick supplement for priests-in-training at the time. Consequently it is quite rough around the edges and presumes some prior knowledge. Feel free to schedule a daisan if you’d like to discuss this aspect of the teachings. Below are these notes in their…
This session continues to explore and rebut the illusion that meditative states are liberation. We walk through the 10 Bodhisattva stages, show how realization matures, and offers a living method for transforming insight into awakening.
This session dives deep into the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra’s deconstruction of perception, exploring how karmic tendencies shape consciousness through perfumed appearances (nimitta). We unpack the illusion of cessation, the wave mechanics of ālaya-vijñāna, and the recursive logic of self-projected realms. A dense but embodied discussion on how liberation arises not from silence, but from non-grasping.
This talk explores how perception arises from four conditions, including storehouse perfuming and the desire for multiplicity. We examine how beginningless patterns shape our view, how purification is about appropriateness, and how liberation involves skillful participation in the being–becoming flow. Framed through Yogācāra insight, we close with a reminder: the playground includes even the hardest moments.