Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this final session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Sensei Sokaku Kathie Fischer takes up Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra, tracing how sustained attention dissolves the boundary between self and world. Drawing on stories from her own practice life, she returns often to the way small, ordinary contact with things — a stone, a teacup, a mountain trail — can either be led by our concepts or…

Source

In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Reverend Tenmyo Dojima introduces baika, the Soto Zen tradition of Buddhist hymn-singing, chanting a hymn drawn from one of Dogen’s own poems: “Even upon a high, steep cliff where the rough waves cannot reach, the true Dharma clings and takes firm root, just as oysters cling to the rock.” Roshi Joan introduces the faculty panel of the weekend’s…

Source

In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Roshi Norman Fischer takes up Dogen’s fascicle Bodhisattva Shishobo, the Four Methods of Guidance: generosity, kind speech, beneficial action, and identity action. He frames this text as a departure from Dogen’s earlier work — scholars believe it may reflect a late-life turn in Dogen away from esoteric philosophy and toward plain ethical conduct.

Source

In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Sensei Kaz Tanahashi traces Dogen’s contemporary journey from a Zen ancestor barely mentioned by D.T. Suzuki — whose paradigm of sudden awakening had little room for Dogen’s teaching — to a figure now studied in more than two hundred English-language publications and translated into other languages across the world. He recounts his own thirty-three…

Source

In this session of Upaya’s Dogen Seminar 2026, Roshi Konjin Gaelyn Godwin gives a close textual reading of Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, tracing a single koan — when a monk asks how to escape cold and heat, and Dongshan answers, “When it’s cold, the cold kills you. When it’s hot, the heat kills you” — through the Blue Cliff Record, multiple named commentators, and competing translations.

Source