Meeting the Inconceivable | Zen Koans, Dreams & the Creative Life

Koans transform us through immersion and saturation, by dissolving the usual boundaries we keep between us and the world. If you have an unanswerable question, the koan is designed to open it.

Today's episode explores a koan from the Miscellaneous Collection that poses:

In the Sea of Ise, 10,000 feet down, lies a single stone.
I want to pick up that stone without getting my hands wet.

Roshi John Tarrant offers a guided meditati...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant explores a koan from The Blue Cliff Record featuring great Yunmen, great Cloud-Gate:

A student asked Yunmen, "When the tree withers and the leaves fall, what's that?"
Yunmen said, "The Golden Wind reveals itself."
— transl. by John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland

Exploring the beauty and wistfulness of Autumn, Tarrant describes it as a time of connecting with the eternal; a time when t...

In this episode, Roshi Allison Atwill tells the story of Baizhang's Fox, a classic koan from The Gateless Gate collection about the nature of karma.

In this koan case, an old man confesses he was once abbot of the mountain temple, but was sentenced to live 500 lives as a fox for misapprehending the nature of cause and effect. The story of his eventual freedom touches on the relief we find in realizing that our particular karma hold...

Fire is the vital element of transformation.

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant discusses the Zen koan, Put Out the Fire Across the River, which originally arose in response to seeing the camp fires of Genghis Khan's army burn brightly through the night.

Fire has a terrifying power for destruction but also a sacred role in connecting us.

Like the old alchemists, we must immerse ourselves in something to transform it, and thereby w...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a koan from The Gateless Gate collection in which the Buddha tells his attendant, "That person is like a fine racehorse who runs at the mere shadow of a whip."

Tarrant investigates our relationship to suffering, describing the four kinds of horse metaphors in Zen Buddhism, ranging from the one who runs at the mere shadow of the whip to the one who must be whipped to the bone.

Noting how ...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant tackles the first great gate of koan study, in which a student asks, "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" And, Zhaozhou simply answers, "No," (translated as "Mu" in Japanese, and "Wu" in Chinese).

Exploring the vivid commentaries that accompany this foundational koan case, including instructions to "cut off the mind road" and "make your whole body a mass of doubt," Tarrant speaks about enterin...

Join Roshi Allison Atwill to explore awakening as a great voyage, one that is entirely your own, and yet in which you are somehow accompanied by the entire universe.

Atwill tells the riveting story of one sailor's solo journey around Cape Horn and reveals how, in the end, he gives up on the mind that races and compares, and turns toward Tahiti...a beacon for his true nature.

What does it mean to give up on the project of improving ...

In this episode, Roshi Tess Beasley speaks about the nature of self-consciousness and how the koan path slowly guides us through the process of discovering our part in it all.

It also ferrets out our strategies for making a separate self that cannot bear the intimacy of awakening.

If we imagine that we are "us", it can be difficult to stare into someone's eyes for a long time until we envision ourselves as the night sky.

When we fo...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a deep, strange koan in which a student asks Yunmen, "Where do all the Buddhas come from?" And, Yunmen answers: "East mountain walks on the water."

Pondering the inevitable questions that appear as part of koan study, like where do we come from, and what is the source of this existence we find ourselves part of, Tarrant considers the traditions of Zen and Haiku as well as hippopotamuses.

In this episode, Roshi Allison Atwill offers insight into Zen's signature transmission beyond words and letters.

Telling the story of infamous Japanese Zen Master, Ikkyu Sojun, and his ambivalence toward transmission, Atwill describes how our particular awakening is always tailor-made to the circumstances of our lives. It always comes through the door we least expect, and dissolves whatever sense of separation we've held in place t...

Today, Roshi John Tarrant offers a guided meditation on a spring koan from the canonical Blue Cliff Record. It tells the story of longtime practitioner Lingyun, wandering in the mountains on a spring day, and suddenly, really seeing peach blossoms for the first time. He writes this verse:

For thirty years I searched for a master swordsman,
how many times did the leaves fall,
and the branches burst into bud?
But from the...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant takes up a series of bright gate koans from The Blue Cliff Record, all featuring one of the greatest Zen masters of all-time, Yunmen.

At the root of these dharmakaya koans lies the question of consciousness, or what Yunmen describes as: what is that light that everyone has?

Chock-full of awakening stories from ancient China to modern day, this talk showcases Zen Buddhism's earthy, humorous, and j...

Can we trust our own unique response to life, our own dharma?

In this episode, Roshi Tess Beasley speaks about how seductive problems are, and how frozen we can become when we think that something beyond what's already here is required.

Telling the story of Juzhi and his infamous awakening encounters, first with the Zen Buddhist nun, True World, and then with the spirit of the mountain, Beasley considers the nature of a true word a...

Today, Roshi Allison Atwill explores the bodhisattva's unique relationship with uncertainty as a healing balm for suffering.

Describing how Zen Buddhism draws from the Mahayana tradition in which the bodhisattva path means helping to awaken all beings, Atwill notes this is not a future goal to somehow be achieved but a moment-to-moment way of meeting every aspect of our own lives with sincere openness.

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Today, Roshi John Tarrant takes listeners on a vivid imaginal journey into the depths of the Blue Dragon's cave of wisdom.

"For twenty years, I've struggled fiercely. How many times have I gone down into the Blue Dagon's cave for you?" This great question appears in Case 3 of The Blue Cliff Record, the canonical Zen Buddhism koan collection.

Tarrant offers context for the power of the Zen koan tradition, describing how the great im...

In this episode, Roshi John Tarrant tells the story of Deshan and his transformative pilgrimage of awakening.

We are all Deshan, ready to let go of our old pile of stories.

What is it like to be on a journey?

How do we get home from a journey?

How does the journey change us?

How can we meet our journey with openness?

"Meditation is a kind of change of heart, but it is more a forgetting to carry our burdens." - John Tarrant.

Learn m...

Today, Roshi Allison Atwill shares a poem about our intrinsic ability to always carry light and silence.

In this episode, she explains how the original silence is always with us and within us.

What are the elemental termas of Tibetan Buddhism?

How can we apply these termas to meditation practice?

We can learn and teach from the silence and the light that we each have within.

"Awakening always appears in our actual life." - Allison ...