On June 29, SF Zen Center's News page will change to a Sangha News blog. With this, the URL of the Sangha News site has changed. On the blog and on our web site, we've also added navigation options to make it easier (we hope!) to find your way. We hope that you enjoy the new designs and options as we extend our experiments with digital dharma!

The sangha-e! newsletter will be Sangha News Weekly, with a new template and options. 

Still Life with Old Jars

Artist Statement

Sunday, July 17, 9am-noon
Mills College
Carnegie Hall, Bender Room
5000 MacArthur Blvd.
Oakland, CA 94613

Please join the Bay Zen Center for a gathering honoring the life and teachings of Charlotte Joko Beck on Sunday, July 17, at Mills College in Oakland. Whether you have been touched by Joko’s teachings personally or through her writings, this informal gathering will be an opportunity to pay tribute to someone who has touched the lives of so many. The morning will begin with a 30 minute zazen period followed by an opportunity for anyone to share a story, words or whatever they would like about Joko. We’ll then view a fifty minute documentary film on Joko and conclude with refreshments. Everyone is welcome. Please note that this gathering will not have the formalities of ceremony. Joko lived her life and expressed the teachings without much ado and often reminded us to keep things simple, “nothing added.” She was clear about not wanting a big to-do upon her death. So this is offered in that spirit, simply to gather together and remember who she was and what she meant to all of us.

Please RSVP with number of people attending to: Brent Beavers: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Directions to Mills College

Campus map of Mills College to locate Carnegie Hall

Bay Zen Center web page announcement

Begins Saturday, July 2

Marcia Lieberman

Gardening at the urban temple is in full swing. With pockets of green at 300 Page Street, we are working on shifting our gardens from ornamental to sustainable sources of altar flowers, herbs, and fruit. City Center has already seen the advent of Bee and Flower chidens, students whose job is to care for those areas of the city center gardens. Rumor has it that a compost worm chiden may also soon appear. As help is needed to support this transformation, Marcia Lieberman, the head gardener and environmental steward, will spend Saturday afternoons with volunteers working outside doing gardening tasks with environmental issues guiding the group.

All are invited to join: The focus of the garden work parties will be on urban living and what you can do to green what limited space you may have. Marcia, inspired by the French tradition of a potagé, or kitchen side garden, has already overseen the revitalization of the City Center side garden by adding fruit trees, herbs, blueberries, and beautiful nasturtium which have made appearances in our salads. Her vision for City Center is grand; she hopes to someday see a fragrant orangerie in the courtyard portico and a vegetable greenhouse on the rooftop (near our honeybees which already call the roof their home), which will also double as a place for practice discussion and informal teas.

Please join us on Saturdays, July 2, August 13, and September 3, from 1:30 to 4pm. Entry through the 308 Page Street gate will lead to the meeting place in the side courtyard. Wear suitable clothing and bring a weeding tool if you can. Tea, cookies, and conversation will conclude our afternoon together.

Come be a part of the transformation.

Photo by Karissa Sellman

Win a Treat for Mind, Body, and Spirit
Tickets are now on sale for the Tassajara Raffle!

The grand prize winner receives an all-inclusive weekend for two during the 2012 Tassajara Guest Season. This includes: Two free nights for two, your choice of cabin, your choice of a 3-day retreat for two, massage for two, transportation to and from Tassajara on the stage, fresh vegetarian meals and, of course, use of the baths and hot springs. What's more, the second prize winner receives a free 3-day retreat for two while third prize includes a massage for two.

Each raffle ticket costs $20 and a group of 5 costs $80.

For more information, please call 415.865.1899. Tickets are available in the Tassajara Stone Office, and at the bookstores at City Center in San Francisco and Green Gulch Farm in Marin.

The drawing will be held at the close of the 2011 guest season in September and you need not be present to win.

UPDATE: Raffle tickets on sale through September 26; the raffle drawing is on September 30.

Thank you, as always, for your generous support. Good luck!

Photo by Alison Bank

Year-long Sangha in Recovery Program begins September 10

with Jeffrey Schneider and Tim Wicks

The Sangha, along with the Buddha and the Dharma, is one of the Three Refuges of Buddhism. It is the community of men and women who practice together. In recovery, we share our “experience, strength and hope” with one another. Encouraging each other in sangha helps us to realize our intention to live an awakened life.

The San Francisco Zen Center is offering, in three trimesters, a yearlong experience of Sangha for people in recovery. Events are scheduled to accommodate working men and women. Many in our community have found Buddhist practice and our work in recovery equally affirming. Those who join this group will commit to the practice of meditation, attending a class on basic Buddhist concepts, and meeting together and individually with the organizing teachers. This program is open to all men and women in recovery from substance abuse or behavioral disorder.

Read More »

Jeffrey Schneider has been practicing at San Francisco Zen Center, where he is a priest, since 1978. He began the Meditation in Recovery Group at Zen Center in 2000 and has led retreats on Buddhism and Recovery in a variety of venues. He is a Certified Addiction Treatment Counselor and a member of the California Association for Alcohol/Drug Educators.

Tim Wicks has been practicing Buddhism since 2000. He is a co-leader of Zen Center’s Meditation in Recovery program and the facilitator of the Meditation in Recovery program at Hartford Street Zen Center. Tim also teaches sewing Buddha’s robe (rakusu and okesa) at City Center. He is currently in the priest training program.

The Pacific School of Religion and Dharma Realm Buddhist University present a direct encounter with a living Buddhist tradition dating back to ancient China.

Poetry reading and book event
with Norman Fischer

Friday, September 2
7:30 - 9 pm

City Center, 300 Page Street, SF

Norman will read from his just-out book-length poem conflict, which is an exploration of conflict in all its forms—conflict built into the mind and the nature of thought; conflict within the self; conflict between friends, lovers, communities, nations; war; torture. He will also read from other new work.

conflict will be published by Chax Press, Tucson, AZ

Excerpt:

“the” is “one”

“one” implies more

on the letters’ humps

in our language

so terribly convincing

married

they could be so alone

                “who can help us

          with our human
problems?”

First meeting: Monday, June 6 • 7:30 - 8:30pm
308 Page Street, next door to SF Zen Center

Young Urban Zen is a new group under the auspices of the San Francisco Zen Center. In January, some "young adult" Zen Center folks decided to offer space and some structure for a group of people to gather and share their practice. Come, make some "spiritual friends."

We’ll be meeting Monday nights to meditate together, and to discuss our experiences of Zen practice. In addition to our weekly routine, there will be opportunities to talk with some of Zen Center’s senior teachers.

Facebook page

Marcus Hartsfield-back tattoo of Buddha

People often ask me why I get tattooed and why I have so many. I have 40 tattoos, including one that covers my entire back. Being tattooed has helped bring me back to my body: to quite literally mark it as my own and take ownership of it. It no longer belongs to those who abused me or to the doctors and surgeons. Being tattooed is certainly not the only way I truly inhabit my body; Zen Buddhist practice—especially zazen—and yoga, certainly help me in this regard.

One of the text tattoos, a poem:

    Satori
    Don’t think
    That it will be glorious:
    That momentary burst
    Of radiance
    Illuming all.
    Nonsense
    It is more like
    Losing your mother
    In a large Department Store forever.

I have always loved this poem yet I do not know who wrote it.

My back is covered by an exact rendering of the Buddha on the main altar of San Francisco Zen Center. The statue is an ancient Ghandara Buddha from a formerly Buddhist region in Afghanistan. This statue has very deep meaning for me. It is not an Asian Buddha at all; it is Western, with a European face, done in the Greco-Roman style because Ghandara was a Greek outpost at the time the statue was carved. For years, this fact was lost on me as I sat in the Buddha Hall and struggled with the idea of this “Asian” religion. But, it hit me one day that this Buddha I was sitting in front of was Western, like me, and that Buddhism is not about race or culture, but about something universal that is in all of us.

Full article on the Wildmind web site

Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple, by Kaoru Nonomura—published by Kodansha International; translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.

This remarkable book, written by Kaoru Nonomura, a young “salaryman” living in Tokyo, Japan, is the account of the year he spent at Eiheiji Temple, the home of Soto Zen Buddhism founded by Eihei Dogen in the year 1244.

What makes this book interesting, especially to martial artists, is how many of the core martial arts principles the author encountered during his year-long stay at this monastery. For example, the details of his everyday life in the monastery and attention to detail reminded me of the attention that is required when learning a martial art technique.

Take cleaning the mat, for example, a task that is a regular part of any dojo’s routine. The author writes, “The floor cleaning would begin at the highest point in Eiheiji, outside the Dharma Hall. Every trainee monk in the temple raced up the stairs in the sloping corridor at top speed, cleaning cloth tightly in hand. The sight was truly awesome. There were no stragglers.” The reader will quickly realize that this is indeed a very tight discipline.

Yet, in the midst of all this, the author begins a metamorphosis.

From: "A Martial Artist Making a Difference - A Review of Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple" by Paul Rest

Review published at Examiner.com

Paul Rest, the reviewer, was a student during the 1970's and early 80's at City Center and Green Gulch Farm and still studies and practices Zen through his Aikido practice.

For updated information, please link to our new News page listing for this event.

Also, for more Fire Monks events, link to Colleen's web page

Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara by Colleen Morton Busch

Forthcoming on July 7, 2011 from Penguin Press.

In June 2008 more than two thousand wildfires, all started by a single lightning storm, blazed across the state of California. Tassajara, the oldest Zen Buddhist monastery in the United States, was at particular risk. Set deep in the Ventana wilderness east of Big Sur, the center is connected to the outside world by a single unpaved road. If fire were to enter the canyon, there would be no way out.

Disaster struck during the summer months, when Tassajara opens its doors to visitors and the grounds fill with guests expecting a peaceful respite. Instead, the mountain air filled with smoke, and monks broke from regular meditation to conduct fire drills. All visitors were evacuated, and many Zen students followed. A small crew of residents and firefighters remained, planning to defend Tassajara. But nothing could have prepared them for what came next. When a treacherous shift in weather conditions brought danger nearer still, firefighters made the flash decision to completely evacuate the monastery. As the firefighters and remaining residents caravanned out the long road from Tassajara, five monks turned back, risking their lives to save the monastery. Fire Monks is their story.

A gripping narrative as well as an insider’s portrait of the Zen path, Fire Monks reveals what it means to meet an emergency with presence of mind. In tracking the four men and one woman who returned—all novices in fire but experts in readiness—we witness them take their unique experiences facing the fires in their own lives and apply that wisdom to the crisis at hand. Relying on their Zen training, the monks accomplished the seemingly impossible—greeting the fire not as an enemy to defeat but as a friend to guide. Read More »

Events

Thursday, July 14, 7:30-9 pm
San Francisco Zen Center
300 Page St. (at Laguna)
San Francisco, CA

This special kickoff event will celebrate the publication of Fire Monks with a talk by Abbot Steve Stucky, a short clip from a film documentary-in-progress, a reading by the author, and discussion with wildland firefighters and fire monks from the 2008 and previous Tassajara fires.

Book signing to follow the program.

Sunday, July 17, 11 am
Green Gulch Farm
1601 Shoreline Highway
Muir Beach, CA

Book signing after the regular Sunday program.

Click here for info on the Sunday program at Green Gulch Farm

For more events, click here.

Photo of Keith by Brianna Kirby

In 1986, Autoimmune Inner Ear Disease (AIED) left me profoundly deaf for several months. Over the following year, half my hearing returned, leaving me severely hard-of-hearing. Not much was known about AIED back then, and not much more is known now. Statistics said I would possibly become deaf “probably within 10 years.” I took on the task of preparing for the possibility with classes in American Sign language (ASL), and Deaf Culture. Ten years passed, then another ten. It started to appear I would beat the odds and remain hard of hearing, and I settled in as a hard-of-hearing person in a hearing world.

A year ago, my hearing began to fluctuate, and by June 2010, I was profoundly deaf in the right ear. By September, three months later, the left ear became severely deaf. Despite preparing for it in advance, it surprised me a great deal, and in unexpected ways. Prior to September, I never thought of Deafness as being more than a moderate challenge. I still appear the same to others, for the most part. I think this may be why I experience frustration and impatience, sometimes, on the part of others with whom I interact. The fact that I can speak clearly adds to the expectation that I will hear you if you speak louder, or exaggerate your