Category Archives: Nona Strong Roshi

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Note: this is the first of two talks. The second is “No Fixed Point in Which We Can Rest.” Here’s an alleged quote from the actor Edward G. Robinson about the inner craft of acting. I think it also might apply to ourselves and our daily lives. He wrote, simply: Every oneContinue reading “it’s all made up”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Note: this is the second of two talks. Please listen first to “It’s All Made Up”. Last week’s talk, “It’s All Made Up,” was I think a little unsettling to some of us, myself included, to tell you the truth. This week, I want to read some passages from a few spiritualContinue reading “no fixed point in which we can rest”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] I think we can all agree that we all must be able to maintain a certain presence of mind in order to conduct ourselves through our daily lives. We must be able to connect with the happenings of our days, in our personal circumstances and in the larger world, and in thatContinue reading “presence of mind to absence of mind”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] We spend a lot of energy on the question of self; i.e., just who or what is this self I call me? Who, in fact, is the “I” who’s even asking these questions? Since that seems to be a fundamental question that all of us experience – from time to time, atContinue reading “what defines us?”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Here is a familiar story from Zen lore. It’s about Rinzai (Linji in Chinese) and an unnamed monk, and it’s often referred to as “Rinzai’s True Man of No Rank.” Today, we’d say “true person,” and many recent translations do use that terminology. But here’s the story as presented in a collectionContinue reading “setting our self aside”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] The Great Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra says this: “form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form;form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form;” When we present these phrases for mental examination, they may not make sense. In fact, they probably don’t make sense – not to our minds and intellects,Continue reading “balance, equivalence, and true nature”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] Tonight, I want to touch on a koan that has somehow stuck in my consciousness and is shouting very loudly within me of late. It’s a scenario that hones in on the walls we build that make up our individual worlds – the boundaries we draw that circumscribe our experience of living.Continue reading “the walls we build”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] The book titled The Zen Teaching of Huang Po [tr. John Blofeld, 1958, pp. 127 – 128] reports a monk having a dialogue with Master Huang Po: Q: To whom did the Patriarch [that is the Second Patriarch, Hui-ke] silently transmit the Dharma? A: No Dharma was transmitted to anybody. Q: ThenContinue reading “transmission of mind – coming to awareness”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the first talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the June 2022 zen sesshin at Mercy Center Burlingame. “To have it all stripped bare, just experienced directly, naked: this is sesshin.” (Roko Sherry Chayat, Rinzai Zen master, Syracuse, NY, in Sitting with Koans, p. 337) This means staying awake whileContinue reading “staying awake”

[AUDIO AND TEXT] This is the second talk given by Nona Strong Roshi at the June 2022 zen sesshin at Mercy Center Burlingame. In the Heart Sutra, we read: Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness is no other than form. Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. The Diamond Sutra has the same factContinue reading “awakening ain’t thinking it”