Pacific Zen Institute

Tonight on Pacific Zen Luminaries!

Peter Hershock, PhD is a philosopher, scholar and former director of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i. For decades he has used Buddhist conceptual resources to address contemporary issues of global concern, including the way technology is affecting our modern world.

The author and editor of numerous books, in 2018 he established the Humane AI Initiative, a program at the center that coordinated working papers, scholarly forums, and collaboration with media to address human rights and global governance of the technology. His most recent works include Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (2021) and Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis (2023).

With three other Buddhist leaders, last year Peter co-founded the Buddhism & AI Initiative, an international workshop group. Since retiring from EWC last year, Peter has served as a consultant to AI companies such as Anthropic, and is an eagerly sought speaker on the subject throughout the world.

Join us tonight at 6pm Pacific!

Follow the link in comments to register and receive your link for this online event.

Stillness

When all else fails, we can just stop.

In stillness you are at the center of everything.

Since it’s hard to describe the way presence spreads out, Zen uses images:

A tree with no wind.

A pool of dark water with the moon.

The mountains at midnight.

When we meditate or listen, we

are at the still point of the turning world.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

—T.S. Eliot

Join us this Sunday to enter the stillness.

—John Tarrant Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen August 23rd – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

Next Monday night on Pacific Zen Luminaries!

Peter Hershock, PhD is a philosopher, scholar and former director of the Asian Studies Development Program at the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawai’i. For decades he has used Buddhist conceptual resources to address contemporary issues of global concern, including the way technology is affecting our modern world.

The author and editor of numerous books, in 2018 he established the Humane AI Initiative, a program at the center that coordinated working papers, scholarly forums, and collaboration with media to address human rights and global governance of the technology. His most recent works include Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future (2021) and Consciousness Mattering: A Buddhist Synthesis (2023).

With three other Buddhist leaders, last year Peter co-founded the Buddhism & AI Initiative, an international workshop group. Since retiring from EWC last year, Peter has served as a consultant to AI companies such as Anthropic, and is an eagerly sought speaker on the subject throughout the world.

Join us next Monday night at 6pm Pacific!

Follow the link in comments to register and receive your link for this online event.

Out east, Summer thunderstorms wield tremendous force and beauty most afternoons and evenings, sweeping in and out like vast dragons summoning the winds and rain to move the world along.

Being in the company of a great storm enfolds us in the world and reminds us it's not so hard to let the universe pour through.

In the I Ching, ancient book of changes, thunder is a rousing force … awakening all that’s dense and stuck in us toward movement and new life.

Shock comes—oh, oh!
Laughing words—ha, ha!
- Hexagram 51

Fear is chief among the gates of awakening.

Join us Sunday for meditation and more under the great skies.

—Tess Beasley Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen August 16th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

Student: “Please explain it to me.”
“I could tell you but you would blame me later.”

Be a person here. Stand in your own life.
No one else can make our mistakes for us.
It’s a joyful thing to take account of our own lives.

Here’s William Stafford:

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call.

Join us in the great open temple.
Sunday 10.30—noon

—John Tarrant Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen August 9th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

Sesshin—to touch the mind, to touch the heart
2026 Great Autumn Sesshin
with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers

San Damiano Center
Danville, California
October 25–November 1, 2026

We walk the avenue of autumn,
stags are standing on their hind legs to reach the last apples.
The trees, the blowing leaves
and the antlers—
inside all the emptiness is a great pattern
that we too are a part of.
The stars remember you too,
they consider the beauty of your individual life as a star.

A seven day sesshin is one of the great things a human can do.
Afterwards, we are changed.
Join us

—John Tarrant Roshi

Registration now open! Follow the link in the comments for more details and to register

Registration now open for PZI's August Open Temple – Special Summer Intensive Training Period

Late Summer is a precious time before the acceleration and great turning of Fall.

In traditional temple life, seasonal intensives complement long retreats each year as times of wading out deeper into the river under the river that carries everything along. As well as more sitting, the idea was everything became practice … washing the floor, tending the garden, sweeping the stones. Creative work often came calling, too.

Our temple life is less traditional, but continues to deepen year after year, and so we’re going to undertake our own Summer Intensive this year by adding two hours of meditation to the Open Temple each weekday (4-hours total) until the August 28th Full Moon.

The idea is whatever you’re up to, even if it’s visiting family or rushing along in the usual, your practice comes, too, and we companion each other a bit more than usual.

Tess Beasley, Roshi will also be offering a practice/koan discussion each Friday in both the East & West Temples.

Please join us for any or all you can.

Something strange and wondrous about being part of a community is that somehow you’re never outside any particular gathering.

Whether you’re able to sit one period each week or eight every day, you’re with us.

Register for PZI's August Open Temple – Link in comments!

Meditation can’t be praised enough.
The benefits of generosity and discipline,
prayer, self-reflection, and practice,
have their source in meditation.

With what we gain from just one sitting,
all our crimes are wiped away.

—Hakuin Ekaku

Enlightenment happens inside this life that we have. It’s not some other more satisfactory life with special conditions. So you set off!

You go through one archway, and then you go through a second, and then a third archway, and eventually your worries fall away, though you didn’t ask them to, all desperation falls away and any cause of suffering in the mind is illuminated. Life after life you have been doing this and it’s not a surprise that you come eventually to the Buddha, who is sitting on an ordinary zafu smiling, and Buddha says, “Yes, that’s it, you are doing it alright, just do zazen like that!” and happiness comes over you.

Meditation is also extra good if you do it together with friends.

—John Tarrant Roshi

Join us this Sunday as we take up the koan:

Guishan asked Yangshan, “Suppose that out of the blue, someone asks you, ‘All sentient beings only have disorderly consciousness, boundless and with no foundation to rely on.’ How would you conduct an inquiry into this?

”Yangshan said, “If a student like that came, I’d call, ‘Hey so and so!’
When the student turns her head, then I’d say, ‘What is it?’ Then I’d wait while she thinks about it. Then I’d say, ‘Not only is disorderly consciousness boundless but also there is no foundation to rely on.’”

Guishan said, “Good!”

—Book of Serenity, Case 37

Register for Deep Sit Sunday Zen July 26th – 9:00am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

All the world's a stage, wrote Shakespeare, and in our short time we play many parts.

In Zen, we call it the great dream, and it lives its way through us as names and faces and ever-changing plots.

We're doomed, no, we're saved, wait, our hands are full of gifts and blossoms, wait, no, we're suddenly alone and feel abandoned once more.

To be free in the dream is the great blessing of awakening, to know all it can offer us and also that it can't be kept even a minute longer.

Singing and dancing are the voice of the Way, wrote Hakuin in his Praise Song for Meditation.

Join us this Sunday as we take our places and see what unfolds.

—Tess Beasley Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen July 19th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

Tonight on Pacific Zen Luminaries!

Ada Limón, 24th US Poet Laureate

Limón, a native of Sonoma, Ca., was named the 24th United States poet laureate in 2022. Her seven volumes of poetry have won widespread praise, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2019. Her latest volume, Startlement: New and Selected Poems, was published in 2025.

Ada has practiced Buddhist meditation for over twenty-five years. She says of her practice, “I was desperate to find something…I went for the free classes [at the Tibet House], and it just became a practice. In fact, I brought my teacher, Marie Howe, there once, and we practiced together. One of the great lessons I took away from your teaching was the idea of having some humor as you practice.”

“I think poetry, at its core, is about paying attention. When you’re deeply looking at something, I think poetry, at its core, is about paying attention. When you’re deeply looking at something, you’re loving it. And I think that when you do that, whether it’s with a person or a nonhuman animal or a plant or a tree, it is a way of witnessing and being witnessed and recognizing that we are in this together.”

Join us tonight at 6pm Pacific!

Follow the link in comments to register and receive your link for this online event.