Dharma Library

The third week in March I participated in a 7-day silent Koan Retreat at Dharma Drum Retreat Center in upstate Pine Bush, New York. Seven days spent focusing on a short exchange between a head monk and a zen master written maybe a thousand years ago. 7 days of silence.

On the second day we were directed to pick the koan or huatou (basically the punch line of a koan, used commonly by Ch’an, the…

Our Guiding Teacher, Chan Master Simon Child, Jing-hong Chuan-fa, is the second Western Dharma heir of the late Chan Master Sheng Yen of Taiwan, receiving Dharma Transmission in 2000. This is the first part of a transcription of a dharma talk he gave on a Silent Illumination retreat in September 2017. Our thanks go to the transcribers. The second part will be published as ‘Habit Seeds’

This was my second Retreat with the WCF; my first a little over 9½ months ago was the introductory Taste of Chan with Fiona in Derbyshire. Prior to that I had no experience of meditation at all.

If the first Retreat helped me to understand and accept events impacting significantly upon my life the second, a Western Zen Retreat at Maenllwyd, surprisingly helped to clear out baggage I had been…

A koan is a teaching tool to challenge you to solve the insoluble. It is a most ingenious Chinese invention in the history of Zen education. It is not entirely silly. You can solve the insoluble, but you do not get a ‘solution’ that is transferable to other people as a gobbet of knowledge. And you do not get an ‘answer’ that is in the form predicted by the question. What you get instead is a…

A review of Sam van Schaik’s Tibetan Zen: Discovering a Lost Tradition (2015), Snow Lion, London.

This book is of interest to our Sangha for several reasons. Firstly, John Crook always maintained a link with Tibetan traditions through various practices, especially Mahamudra, and that link continues with our Tibetan based liturgy on Western Zen Retreats. Secondly, this book originates from…

This is to relate my experience of having ME/CFS, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and my recovery, with reference to my Buddhist practice. So first going back a bit to look at the context of getting ME: since reaching pension age and retiring from my various part-time jobs (Councillor, Interviewer, Receptionist/Librarian), over 10 years ago, my life continued to be something of a busy juggling act. I…

In The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment is an important teaching about the illusory self that chauffeurs us around samsara.

The Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, in the chapter ‘Bodhisattva Cleansed of All Karmic Obstructions,’ states:

Virtuous man, since beginningless time all sentient beings have been deludedly conceiving and clinging to the existence of self, as the essence of a real self,…

When we meditate, we try to make our minds bright. It is not so easy! At first we find our habitual scattered thoughts, confusions, distractions and nervous tensions, and gradually we try to let them go; we allow them to calm down, relax, and eventually melt away. We put special effort, attention and energy into this.

We try to return to the present moment, the sense of place, the feeling of…

Similar to most people in our Sangha I have looked at a few walls in my time. Whereas I might not be a great meditator, you could still say that to some extent I am quite an expert on having a close intimate investigatory connection with the lumps and bumps, colours and shadows on the walls that have been in front of my cushion. But this is something different; I am not in a sitting meditation…

Introduction 

In terms of our ceremonies, as lay practitioners, we only undertake a small part of what occurs in monastic communities, but, as with everything, we need to examine and question what it is that we actually do. We need to discover the larger sense of what constitutes our liturgy and to appreciate its place within the totality that is Chan Buddhism. Our liturgy reveals a history of…