Video Library

What do we do when life doesn’t go the way we want it to? Following a sangha sharing about impermanence, Gyodo Sensei offers an introduction to the Four Relational Sufferings and how to work with them as koans: encountering the unpleasant, separation from the pleasant, not getting what one wants, and the five aggregates.

Koans are situations that invite investigation of attachments, with the intention to release attachments and live with less suffering. When working with the challenges of everyday life as koans, we meet the situation with the mind of not knowing rather than relying on intellectual solutions or past experience. Gyodo Sensei gives an overview of the Eight Sufferings the Buddha discussed in his first teaching.

In part two of this series, Gyodo Sensei offers further reflections on Everyday Life Koans. Koans arise in the gap between our life as we want it to be - with all its attachments and wishful thinking - and life as-it-is, unfolding all the time. When working with a koan, we let go of the analytical mind and plunge directly into the intimate, visceral experience of that gap.

Koans are a unique Zen practice of bringing meditative mind to the deepest questions and challenges of life. Gyodo Sensei offers an overview of koan practice in the Rinzai tradition and how everyday life koans go further in the realms of home, work, and relationships not covered in traditional monastic practice. Practice Leaders Sokyo and Gakyo share their experiences with everyday life koans.

Gyodo Sensei gives an introduction to the interpenetrating dimensions of the Three Treasures of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha: the one body or absolute dimension, the manifest or historical dimension, and the maintained, or relative dimension.