Henry Shukman with Sam Harris
Waking Up Conversations
Henry Shukman
Selected episodes free on YouTube; full series in the Waking Up app subscription.
Source: Waking Up app (wakingup.com) / Sam Harris podcast
The conversations Henry Shukman — Zen teacher at Mountain Cloud Santa Fe — has been giving on Sam Harris's Waking Up app and podcast may be the most consequential bridge between contemporary contemplative practice and the secular meditator population built so far. Shukman speaks the language of phenomenology, neuroscience, and Western therapy without compromising Zen depth. The result is a body of conversations that has carried hundreds of thousands of secular meditators into their first encounter with the koan curriculum and the prospect of awakening.
The most influential secular-bridge dharma broadcast of the 2020s. The doorway through which a generation of non-religious meditators is meeting Zen.
The sangha responds.
More foundational talks from Zen.
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Original Audio Lectures
The original audio recordings made at Sokoji and the early San Francisco Zen Center between 1965 and 1969 — the lectures that, after Suzuki Roshi's death, his student Trudy Dixon edited into the most-read Zen book in the English language. The audio survives. It is the only direct recording we have of Shunryu Suzuki teaching: the slight broken English, the long pauses, the distinctive 'eh?' between sentences, the laughter. For students of Soto Zen anywhere in the world, these tapes are a relic.
Realizing Genjōkōan
Genzo-e Lecture Series
Shohaku Okumura — Uchiyama Roshi's principal disciple, the founder of Sanshin Zen Community in Indiana, and the leading English translator of Dōgen — gives the Genzo-e (extended sesshin Dōgen-study) lectures on the Genjōkōan. These are the definitive English-language teachings on Dōgen's most central fascicle. Okumura works the Japanese, the Chinese sources, the Indian Buddhist substrate, and the contemporary practitioner's mind, all at once. There is no other figure doing Dōgen scholarship in English with this depth.
The Eight Gates of Zen
John Daido Loori — founder of Zen Mountain Monastery in upstate New York and one of the principal architects of training-temple Zen in America — gives his foundational teaching on the Eight Gates: zazen, study with a teacher, academic study, liturgy, right action, art practice, body practice, and work practice. The Eight Gates framework remains the most complete, integrated training curriculum any Western Zen teacher has built. The talks are the syllabus.