Prajnatara--Mother of Zen

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Prajnatara--Mother of Zen

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"Zen Jeoparody - 2025"
Freedom in Vast Emptiness
In honor of First Patriarch Bodhidharma's (purported) birthday, Min'Ui Maitri gives us the Dharma talk.
With or without answers, my bed was the most important in the ER but only in the sense that every other bed was just as unique and vital. Such understanding can never be learned in books or rituals; it is never handwritten or spoken; it is embodied.
'Nothing' is Empty
Nothing is Empty
Everything is empty
Form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, consciousness are empty
Suffering, origination, stopping, path are empty
Enlightenment is empty
Delusion is empty
Emptiness is empty
All concepts are empty.
One of ZM Seung Sahnâs students once asked whether a female can be enlightenedâapparently there had been some consternation about that at one pointâthe best a woman could hope for was rebirth as a male. He said no. Then he went on to explain that âwomanâ canât be enlightened. âManâ canât be enlightened. Donât make man, donât make woman.Â
Letâs say you rent a new apartment or move into a new house. The previous Tennantâs furniture, paintings, lawnmower, all gone. You feel very satisfied, very hopeful. You may say to yourself, âHow wonderful, itâs totally empty.â Itâs open, and full of potential, and that you think of as a good thing. But letâs say you come home after a night out sometime, and you see your house has been burgled, totally cleaned out, even your lawnmower. You may think of the house being empty in that case I not so good.
DT Suzuki said that all conditioned phenomena is characterized by emptiness. Thatâs a clever way of saying that if you can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, or think it, itâs empty. Emptiness is conditioned by other factors, not the least of which is our thinking.
It just means theyâre all dependent upon something else, that there impermanent, always changing. Our feeling about them changes. Our perception of them changes. If we use our senses to perceive an object and form some sort of consciousness about them, theyâre empty. No eyes, no ears, etc. until no realm of mind consciousness as the Heart Sutra says. That realm of mind consciousness is the thinking dependent upon the sensory perception of an object.
Donât make anything. Donât make concepts about nothing, everything, empty, gender, or awakening, and help all beings. That is awakened action.

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"Be Your Own Refuge"
Jonson Won Yung Miller gives the Dharma talk about how much or how little, and under what circumstances should we have and use a Zen teacher.
All the forms are interconnected--some to center, some to de-center. The physical sensations, both subtle and obvious are all part of our practice. They may not get talked about very much in Western forms of practice, but the physical and mental aspects are inextricably linked.Robert Koho Epstein gave the talk on July 23, 2025.
"Truly Caused"
Everything changes. Fair enough. Intellectually we can acknowledge that. We see old picture of ourselves and we see how much older we look. Relationships change, addresses change, jobs change, and maybe we like those changes, and some we donât. Clinging to the past only leads to suffering, much like when itâs raining and we want to make the weather great again. Change is the nature of all phenomena, and is the result of our  action (or inaction)âthat is, karma. Sometimes the change we wish for may turn out not to be to our liking, such as when the rainy day turns into a hurricane or the string of sunny days leads to a drought. But EVERYTHING is always changing, whether we notice or not, with every breath, with every cloud in the sky, like a great cosmic lava lamp. Every change that comes results in the universe changing, even if we donât notice.Just as we intuitively know that we canât stop that wax from melting and changing form (and that weâd get burnt if we tried), we deny that about other things, still thinking we can still mold things to our liking. So, we can think our way into suffering by wanting to grasp the wax, we can passively accept that change is indeed inevitable, so we just let it, regardless of whether the outcome is beneficial, or we can accept change and try to do what we can so that the result may be to the benefit of all beings.âSo I say to you ââ¨This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world:ââLike a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream;â¨Like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud,â¨Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.ââSo is all conditioned existence to be seen.âThus spoke Buddha.Haengdal Citta gave the Dharma talk about his go-to teaching, the Diamond Sutra.
Diamond Sutra Chapter 3. The Bodhisattva's Vow
The Buddha said to SubhĹŤti: âThe bodhisattvas and mahÄsattvas should subdue their thoughts like this: All the different types of sentient beings, whether they be born from eggs, born from a womb, born from moisture or born spontaneously; whether or not they have form; whether they abide in perceptions or no perceptions; or without either perceptions or non-perceptions, I save them by causing them to enter nirvana without remainder. And when these immeasurable, countless, infinite number of sentient beings have been liberated, in actuality, no sentient being has attained liberation. Why is this so? SubhĹŤti, If a bodhisattva abides in the signs of self, person, sentient being, or life-span, she or he is not a bodhisattva.â
Bodhisattvas donât come to save the day. They donât do it for praise, fame, fortune, to accumulate merit, or even for a Great Cosmic âAttaboy.â Itâs our true nature to help, and when one is helped, all are helped. Although it appears that there are countless separate sentient beings, the reality is that thereâs only one, albeit with countless personalities.
Myeong Jin Eunsahn gave the Dharma talk February 26, 2025.

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Saving/Helping all beings doesn't require grand gestures. It's as simple as doing what you can, paying attention to situation, relationship, and function. Cure cancer? Wonderful, if you can do it. Hold a door open for somebody? Wonderful, if you can do it. It shouldn't take a raging forest fire for us to realize there are opportunities to uphold our Bodhisattva vow, if only we pay attention.Cheolmin Prajna gives the Dharma talk on February 19, 2025.
Welcome to the Pure Land! This pure, beautiful, tranquil Buddha field where you are free from suffering and distractions, and may attain enlightenment with ease. This is your sanctuary, your place of refuge from the trials and negativity from the ordinary world.
And youâre in it, right now, right where you areâŚand youâd know that if your mind is pure. If you suffer from greed, anger, and delusion, youâre still in the Pure Land, you just donât realize it. In the Vimalakirti Sutra, the Buddha teaches that the reason we donât realize this world is the Pure Land is because think itâs seem imperfect. Itâs not as if the pure land has changed to an impure land; we arenât seeing correctly, nothing else. When the Mind is pure, the understand Buddha fields are pure.
If we live according to our Bodhisattva Vows, if we practice the Six Perfections, if we manifest the Four Immeasurables, in other words, if we do what weâre supposed to be doing, then our Mind is right. We intuitively know what function is correct in what situation and in what relationship. And when our Mind is right, then we can see that our Awakened True Nature has been attained right here in this Pure Land.
Then we can go out into the marketplace and help all those who are suffering that they can go out and help someone else who is suffering, and so on, until all sentient beings can realize that this is it. Just this.
Myeong Jin Eunsahn gave the Dharma talk February 12, 2025.
The Bodhisattva Rogers
Have you ever noticed that all the Sutras start with, âThus have I heard?â Or maybe what youâve read started something phrased differently. All the written Suttas & Sutras are based upon Anandaâs prodigious memory. It wasât until hundreds of years after Anandaâs death that any of the Buddhaâs sermons were written down. Then these were translated into Pali, then Sanskrit, then probably a few more local dialects and languages, then Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese, English, German, French, and all the rest.Â
All the Buddhist scripture we have, all the writings of Nagarjuna, Ashvaghosa, Wonhyo, Jinul, Bodhidharma, and the rest are one big game of telephone. From translation to translation, even in just one level there can be variations. Go from Sanskrit to all the others mentioned above, there are bound to be differences; different translators will translate the same writing from Chinese into English and come up with different words.Â
Going from some languages like Chinese to English are never one-for-one. The Chinese character is a representation, not spelling. Itâs not like âchatâ in French = âcatâ in English. The best we can hope for is that the translator captures the spirit of the teaching, and that we donât get hung up on one version of something.Â
In his talk of November 20, 2024, MinâUi Maitri points out that he found 23 translations of the Xinxin Ming, without even trying. Theyâre all relatively close to one another, some possibly embellished more than others, some more literal. We can have favorite translations that work for us, even in the case of a teaching whose opening line is âThe Great Way is easy for those not attached to preferences.âÂ
How many versions of the Heart Sutra have you heard? How about the Four Great Bodhisattva Vows? Does one translation render all others incorrect because the words differ? Sanghas can prefer one version of a chant or a teaching, and Sangha members will get used to them, and may be taken aback when they hear to a different way. But that doesnât make the other versions used in other Sanghas heretical.
The Dharma is the Dharma. And thereâs a reason that weâve been told that the Great Way is beyond words. At least, thus have I heardâŚ
âThereâs something happening here, and you donât know what it isâŚâ
Certitude is the gateway to hell. Assuming we have a handle on what is happening, making sense of it, can be very comforting. It helps us cope with what can seem to be a horrifying life full of suffering and lack of control. But like all coping mechanisms, they workâŚuntil they donât.
OrâŚ
That ânot-knowingâ is also the gateway to freedom, liberating us from our âLittle-Iâ lives and giving us the opportunity to experience emptiness (shunyata) as complete boundlessness rather than a void. Keep this Donât-Know Mind, answer âWhat is thisâŚâ with âDonât Know,â and become open to all things being possible.
Haengdal Citta gave the Dharma talk on November 13, 2024.

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"Now What?"
(This talk was given November 6, 2024, one day after the election in the US).
The âelephant in the roomâ is that today, slightly more than half of the populace is gleeful, slightly less than half is sad. Taking either glee or sadness to the extreme is obviously missing the Middle Path, that sense of equanimity, one of the virtues thatâs part of our practice. Dae Soensanim Seung Sahn called the balance the Primary Point. The Third Patriarch termed the âGreat Way easy for those not attached to preferences.â
Granted, today might be difficult to manifest equanimity. And it might be even more difficult to manifest sympathetic joy (Skt. Mudita) toward that slightly more than half the population. And that portion of the population may not be inclined toward lovingkindness (Skt. Maitri) or compassion (Skt. Karuna). These and wisdom are the Four Perfections, how we avoid picking and choosing. Not exhibiting them certainly makes the Great Way difficult.a way to make it beyond difficult would be to show schadenfreude, taking pleasure to the bad fortune of another, 180 degrees away from Mudita. Wisdom (Skt. Prajna)Â from either side might be a stretch.Â
But, as elections, political parties, voting, and so on are subject to causes and conditions, are therefore empty. Fair enough and, gloating and moping are both impermanent, so theyâll pass. But empty or not, there are consequences to these causes and conditions, and that is reality. Our practice is to experience reality directly. Whining or whooping arenât acknowledging reality. Thereâs way too much âI, I, Iâ involved in them. So we have to accept reality, including the outcome of the election, as well as whining and whooping because theyâre part of it also.Â
But acceptance doesnât mean passive acceptance. Zen practice is active. We donât have to settle. We acknowledge reality being the result of causes and conditions. And if it happens that there is some harm being done as part of this karmic outcome, passivity is not doing our duty as bodhisattvas. We save all beings, not just the slightly more than half, not just the slightly less than half, or the indifferent; we are part of âallâ too. So we need to act wisely, show the wisdom to practice the other three Immeasurables, and take actions that will indeed save ALL beings, including ourselves.Â
Myeong Jin Eunsahn gave the talk November 6, 2024
In keeping with the season, Min'Ui Maitri regales us with stories of Hungry Ghosts and Hell-beings, right out of the Pali & Mahayana Canons. Be prepared to say "Boo!"