Sailing Home
Talks at Google
Norman Fischer
Norman Fischer — former co-abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, founder of Everyday Zen, poet, and one of the most literarily gifted Zen teachers writing in English — gives a Talks at Google session built around 'Sailing Home,' his Buddhist reading of Homer's Odyssey. It is the most accessible single talk for the literate skeptic — the friend who reads novels but has never sat down on a cushion. Fischer's gift is making contemplative life feel like an extension of, rather than a departure from, intellectual life.
The literary-intellectual gateway talk — Zen for the reader, by the most lyrical Zen voice of his generation.
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.