Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, Sensei Fushin takes us through the currents of the Buddha’s raft metaphor — where practice becomes binding together grass, twigs, and branches to cross from a shore that is dangerous and fearful to one that is safe. Drawing on Dogen’s Uji (Being-Time), Fushin challenges the notion of completion, suggesting there is actually no shore to rest on: “There’s no shore to reach, and there’s no clean sequence of this crossing and this river and this arrival.” Blending the relative and absolute, Fushin turns us away from the notion of a distant destination: “The raft and the shore aren’t two different places. They never were.” Through stories of a dying chemistry professor’s unguarded joy, a crisis counselor named Janice whose presence asked nothing, a climbing partner’s quiet word at a frozen moment, and his grandmother’s overcooked roast served as pure love, Fushin traces how we become rafts for each other without knowing it. “Sometimes we build the raft, sometimes we’re carried by it, and sometimes we’re someone else’s raft without even knowing it.”

In the 1st part of this closing session of Planting Life, Alonso Mendez — archaeoastronomer, artist, and farmer — opens a window into the ancient Maya wisdom of corn and cosmos. Drawing on twenty years of research at Palenque and recent discoveries still unpublished, Alonso traces the deep roots of a civilization shaped by maize. Our teeth, he observes, are corn seeds — teeth surviving centuries in caves, mistaken by ancestors for ancestral bones, gave rise to the Maya understanding of corn as ancestor; in Spanish today, peeling back a corn’s husk is still called pelando la mazorca — we are smiling. Alonso brings to this work a lifetime of listening — to the land, to the sky, to the ancestors whose knowledge is still surfacing. Among his subtly provoking revelations: a farmer resting his planting stick at noon, watching its shadow disappear as the sun centered overhead, discovering the zenith passage — the beginning of astronomical science. And the 365-day solar calendar, Alonso reveals, encodes two gestational cycles: corn’s 105-day cycle from planting to harvest, and the human gestation of 260 days — “divinely linked together.” Roshi Joan Halifax and Wendy Johnson then gather the community around what has been given and what is now owed — carrying these seeds of awakening, Roshi urges, not just back into our gardens but into a world that urgently needs demilitarizing, in both the global and the personal sense. To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

In this fourth session of Planting Life, Porter Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo — historian, anthropologist, and executive director of Hapo Community School — brings a thoughtful and generous account of what it means to reclaim education on indigenous terms. At the heart of his talk is a clear distinction: “Education is something we do inherently as human beings that never ends. Schooling is this Prussian business that was devised about 150 years ago.” From this foundation, Porter traces the decade-long effort to wrest control of Hapo Community School from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and rebuild it around Tewa language, culture, and a curriculum that tracks students not by grade level but by the growth stages of corn — soil, seed, growth, and maturation — each stage mirroring a stage of human development. From this philosophical foundation, the question of who counts as a teacher emerges organically — for Porter, anyone contributing to the school — custodian, cook, driver — carries that title, because “those corn plants, those kids, they’re watching you.” In the end, “All we did is remember how we educate as human beings and reconnect with those core values.” To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

In the second session of Planting Life, following the morning’s planting ceremony, Beata Tsosie of Santa Clara Pueblo brings her decades of environmental justice work to bear. Drawing on her work with Tewa Women United and the Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance, Beata maps the layered environmental violence of the Greater Tewa Basin — nuclear contamination from Los Alamos, hexavalent chromium plumes migrating onto Pueblo lands, fracking fields releasing toxins into water systems — and names what connects them: “We live in a culture of allowable harm.” Against this, seed keeping and traditional farming are not nostalgic gestures but acts of survival: “It is an act of resistance to plant our foods and our seeds and keep growing them.” Community rain gardens, mycological remediation at contaminated sites, the revival of indigenous midwifery, and the protection of seed sovereignty — each project is “a little drop of love surrounded by all this environmental violence.” Beata closes by asking us to consider our own relationship to land and food: “Is it relational? Is it reciprocal?” To access the resources page for this program, please sign up by clicking here.

In this Wednesday Night Dharma Talk, offered during Upaya’s Young Adult Sesshin, Sensei Kodo and Sensei Dainin explore two practices that shape the foundation of sesshin: noble silence and Oryoki. Kodo opens by naming what we’re actually up against: a culture of constant stimulation that makes stillness feel uncomfortable, citing silence as “an alternative to modern culture, i.e., samsara.” In meditation, he teaches — “when you try to control the mind, it’s like trying not to breathe.” We don’t fight the mind’s compulsive movement so much as learn to see it clearly. Dainin traces the Five Contemplations of Food from the Buddha’s own instructions to monks through the Chan monastery handbooks that shaped Dogen. Each contemplation asks us to receive food not as comfort or reward but as medicine, as the fruit of countless labors, as life giving itself to life. These contemplations are expressed through the meal gatha chanted at Upaya daily: “May we be nourished, that we may nourish life.” Silence and food, stillness and sustenance — each an expression of what is essential.