April 2026

Announcement From The Village Zendo
 

BULLETIN

April 2026


There is an expression in Japanese, “Without a rope, people bind themselves.” You do not think you are completely free, so you practice trying to liberate yourself. But what is binding you? Look around you. Nothing is binding you, and yet you cannot see it. You feel as if you are bound by something. Buddha calls this delusion. Your mind is not in the right place.”
 
—Taizan Maezumi Roshi


Dear Sangha,

My mind is not in the right place. I am free—but honestly, I do not feel that way. I feel constricted; my shoulders are tense, my jaw. I’m all knotted up, inside and out. What is this? Is it, as Maezumi suggested, just delusion? Or is there something real binding me, imprisoning me, holding me back. And really, what’s the difference between that and delusion anyway?

Well, one difference is that, for now at least, thank God, I am physically free. I am not in chains; I am not enslaved; I am free to say Fuck Trump and not end up in prison. I can march. And oh, this is not something to be taken lightly, this freedom, but it is not everything. We can (and many of us do) live in a reasonably open society, and yet still we may not feel free on the inside. And this is one of the reasons we practice: to become truly liberated, through and through.

In some senses, delusion may be harder to overcome than real oppression (of course I say this with zero experience of the horrors of that kind of a system hanging over me, though it feels sometimes like that reality is closer than we think.) I guess my point is, while real chains can be broken and true tyrants overthrown, how do you break the invisible chains of delusion? How do you overthrow the tyranny of self-doubt? Or, to put it most plainly: How on earth do you free yourself when, for all intents and purposes, you are already free?

With love and freedom and fear,

Taylor Plimpton
Editor

 

APRIL CALENDAR

Thursday, April 2:    Zazen with Dharma Talk by Musho Hoshi, 5:30 pm


Saturday, April 4:    Annual Meeting, Online Only, 4 to 6 pm

Sunday, April 5:       Online: Practice and Inquiry Circle
                                 with Joshin Roshi, 9:30 am

                                 In-Person: Intro to Zen
                                 with Howard, 9:30 am

Thursday, April 9:    Zazen with Dharma Talk by Torei, 5:30 pm
                                  Newcomers Meeting, 6:40 pm

Saturday, April 11:    Zazenkai with Dharma Talk by Mukei, 8:30 am

Sunday, April 12:      Gate of Sweet Nectar Ceremony followed by   
                                   Zazen with Dharma Talk by Jyakuen

Thursday, April 16:    Zazen with Dharma Talk by Jisei

Sunday, April 19:       Zazen with Dharma Talk by Ryoshin Hoshi

                                   In-Person: Music Improv 4 pm

Thursday, April 23:    Fusatsu Ceremony with Precepts Talk by Fusho Sensei


Saturday, April 25:    Tangaryo, 7:30 am – 5:30 pm

Sunday, April 26:       Zazen with Dharma Talk by Jo An Sensei

                                   Path Class 2 pm

Thursday, April 30:   Zazen with Dharma Talk by Jinno


___________________________


ONGOING GROUPS


The Bolivian Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 8 am

            Bolivia Zoom Meeting ID: 297 525 8394; Password: 1234

The People of Color Sitting Group meets online Saturdays: 10:30 am

How to Meditate meets Monday evenings online: 6:30 pm

Sorting Out Your Stuff meets online Tuesdays: 10 am

Liturgy Training: In-Person
               
1st and 3rd Wednesdays of each month: 6 pm

Grace and Grit meets online, first Thursday of each month: 3 pm

 

Saturday, April 4

 
Image by Rodney Musho Greenblat

Join us Saturday, April 4, 2026

4 pm – 6 pm, for our

Annual Members Meeting


The meeting will include a review of our membership,
financials, programs, and special announcements.
There will be time for questions, comments, and suggestions.

VILLAGE ZENDO MEMBERS – JOIN ONLINE HERE

For more information contact: info@thevillagezendo.org

 


Saturday, April 25, 7:30 am to 5:30 pm

In-Person and Online

 
Tangaryo


One of the requirements for becoming a Formal Student of Shinryu Roshi and the Village Zendo teaching staff is “Tangaryo,” or all-day sitting. This custom dates to the earliest days of Zen when those wishing to enter into training would sit for long periods of time in order to demonstrate the sincerity of their aspiration. Tanga is a Japanese term meaning “staying until the morning.” It refers to the overnight stay in a Zen monastery of a wandering monk on pilgrimage. The room set aside for this purpose was known as the tangaryo.

At the Village Zendo we have continued this tradition. After discussing their wish to become a student with Shinryu Roshi, student candidates devote a day to Tangaryo. The day begins with zazen that continues until mid-afternoon. The zazen is unstructured—no bells ring to mark the end of the period and no kinhin. Candidates may take short breaks, if needed, to go to the bathroom or refresh themselves for further sitting.

In the middle of the afternoon, Tangaryo ends and, shortly afterwards, the new students exchange bows and sit down to tea with Roshi who greets them on behalf of the Village Zendo teaching staff.

It is customary at this time to present Roshi with a small monetary donation in lieu of other gifts. There is no minimum or maximum amount required.

With the conclusion of this ceremony, student initiation is complete and the new student is invited to participate in a short Student Entry ceremony on the day following Tangaryo.

If you have questions, or if you wish to become a formal student, please contact info@villagezendo.org.


Everyone is invited to attend in whole or in part to support the new Formal Students. 
   

TRUE EXPRESSIONS  

Creative Offerings from the Sangha


 
Magnolia 



By Adam Seido Levy

In the East Village, where Tenth Street meets Stuyvesant Street, there is a small, triangular park surrounded by a wrought iron fence. The public can’t enter the park because there is no gate.

In the winter, it’s a stark and mournful place, and I often walk past it on my way to Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant that serves the best borscht in town. 

In early April, for the past sixteen years, I make a pilgrimage to see a tree that grows in the middle of this triangular park. 

It’s a magnolia tree, whose budding flowers are sensual, and whose boughs are strong and grand. When in bloom, the tree fills the park with its magnificence. 

For me, the tree’s beauty marks a delicate balancing point between winter’s stillness and the fullness of the approaching season. I stand in the same spot, and every year, without fail, the tree makes me weep. 

 

SHUSO HOSSEN

On Sunday, March 15, Keely Rakushin Garfield became a Senior Student, giving her first Dharma Talk and surviving Dharma Combat. These and many other photos by Joel Tendo Avery are available in full resolution at: https://www.waitforsteadylight.com/#0
Tendo's Instagram address is @wait.for.steady.light
 
 

TEACHINGS

The following Dharma Talk was given by Kenzen on March 22, 2026. You can view the original talk here on YouTube.

 
 


To Be in a Time of War


[This transcript has been edited by the author for readability.]
 
Today I want to share a poem that has moved me recently. It's by a poet named Etel Adnan.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. She grew up in Lebanon and eventually found her way to California where she lived and worked for much of her life. As traveling became difficult she moved to France where she lived with her partner, the sculptor Simone Fattal until her death in 2021.

Etal Adnan was a poet and also a painter, an amazing person. I've been reading and studying her work and I recently came across this poem.

I'm just going to jump into it. It's a long poem. If I read you the whole thing, it would take 45 minutes. I would love to do that. I read it to myself because it's a poem of repetitions, a litany, which makes it easy to skim over on the page. It's one of those poems that's really helped by hearing it in the voice.

I’ll read a bit and then I'll talk a bit about it.

It's called “To be in a Time of War,” which indeed we are.



To say nothing, do nothing, mark time, to bend, to straighten up, to blame oneself, to stand, to go toward the window, to change one’s mind in the process, to return to one’s chair, to stand again, to go to the bathroom, to close the door, to then open the door, to go to the kitchen, to not eat nor drink, to return to the table, to be bored, to take a few steps on the rug, to come close to the chimney, to look at it, to find it dull, to turn left until the main door, to come back to the room, to hesitate, to go on, just a bit, a trifle, to stop, to pull the right side of the curtain, then the other side, to stare at the wall.


To wake up, to stretch, to get out of bed, to dress, to stagger towards the window, to be ecstatic about the garden’s beauty, to observe the quality of the light, to distinguish the roses from the hyacinths, to wonder if it rained in the night, to establish contact with the mountain, to notice its color, to see if the clouds are moving, to stop, to go to the kitchen, to grind some coffee, to lit the gas, to heat water, hear it boiling, to make the coffee, to put off the gas, to pour the coffee, to decide to have some milk with it, to bring out the bottle, to pour the milk in the aluminum pan, to heat it, to be careful, to pour, to mix the coffee with the milk, to feel the heat, to bring the cup to one’s mouth, to drink, to drink again, to face the day’s chores, to stand and go to the kitchen, to come back and put the radio on, to bring the volume up, to hear that the war against Iraq has started.


To rise early, to hurry down to the driveway, to look for the paper, take it out from its yellow bag, to read on the front-page WAR, to notice that WAR takes half a page, to feel a shiver down the spine, to tell that that’s it, to know that they dared, that they jumped the line, to read that Baghdad is being bombed, to envision a rain of fire, to hear the noise, to be heart-broken, to stare at the trees, to go up slowly while reading, to come back to the front-page, read WAR again, to look at the word as if it were a spider, to feel paralyzed, to look for help within oneself, to know helplessness, to pick up the phone, to give up, to get dressed, to look through the windows, to suffer from the day’s beauty, to hate to death the authors of such crimes, to realize that it’s useless to think, to pick up the purse, to go down the stairs, to see people smashed to a pulp, to say yes indeed the day is beautiful, not to know anything, to go on walking, to take notice of people’s indifference towards each other.

To have lunch. To ask for some beer. To give one’s order. To drink, eat, and pay. To leave. To reach home. To find the key. To enter. To wait. To think about the war….



The poem keeps going, and we'll come back to it a little bit. Etel Adnan was writing in 2003 about the Iraq War, but it feels to me like this moment we’re in now.

Ordinary Life Continues

What made me want to share this poem is that Adnan expresses something that I've found especially confounding over the past few years: there are horrible things happening and at the same time, my life continues.

A school is bombed, I drink my coffee; I go out with my friends, I hear that new anti-trans laws are being passed and people are afraid for their lives.

All of this is constantly going on, and at the same time my own ordinary life is happening with its beautiful days and its spring, its difficulties and its frustrations.
A shift happened in me a few years ago. War used to seem like it was happening out there and far away. I grew up during the Vietnam War, so American violence overseas has been happening my whole life. We've been assassinating this leader and bombing that country and joining in this military action and oppressing people here in our country and in other places.

This has all been going on the whole time, but for some reason I feel it differently now. It doesn't feel like these wars and bombardments are happening to somebody else far away, and that there's some kind of weird haven around me. It actually feels like it's happening right in here, all of it, right in me, all the time.

I need to find new ways of being with this. This poem has been one part of that. Etel Adnan is right there with everything that's happening inside her and outside her, and I’ve found it helpful, consoling.

The Great Way is Not Difficult.

You might be asking yourself what does this have to do with Zen?
One of the other things that I've been reading recently is an ancient Zen teaching poem called the Hsin Hsin Ming.

The Hsin Hsin Ming was written in approximately the year 600, so it's one of the oldest of the Chinese teaching poems that we have. The title means basically “faith in heart-mind.” It's attributed to the Sengcan, the person that we call our third Chinese ancestor.

When this form of Buddhism was brought to China, there were six ancestors who passed the teachings on to each other in succession. The third of these is Sengcan. Very little is known about him, almost nothing. What we can know comes a in part from this poem.

It begins with a very famous and charismatic line: “The great way is not difficult. Just don't pick and choose.” You might recognize this from a koan where Joshu says this as he's teaching— in that translation: “The ultimate path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing.”

I've always found this line full of life, vibrating with its questions and its answers at the same time.

So the Hsin Hsin Ming begins this way:


The Great Way is not difficult, 
Just don't pick and choose. 
If you cut off all likes or dislikes 
Everything is clear like space.

Make the slightest distinction 
And heaven and earth are set apart. 
If you wish to see the truth, 
Don't think for or against.

Likes and dislikes 
Are the mind's disease. 
Without understanding the deep meaning 
You cannot still your thoughts.

It is clear like space, 
Nothing missing, nothing extra. 
If you want something 
You cannot see things as they are.


For me, the kind of choosing that's being talked about isn't so much, “Should I have a burrito? Should I have Chinese food? Should I take this job or that job? Should I make this or that decision at work today?” It's not that kind of choosing.

We do have to make those choices all the time as we move through our lives. It's good not to be completely controlled by our likes and dislikes and preferences, but we do have to act on them in some way.

For me, the kind of choosing that's being talked about is instead the choosing of what we allow to enter into our own consciousness.

A Spring Day

For instance, it's New York. It's a spring day. You're walking down the street. Maybe you're feeling good. You see a flower at the base of a tree. You lean down. Oh, yes, yes. Then right next to the flower, there's a pile of dog shit!

It's very tempting to try to hold on to that story of the beautiful day and the beautiful flower and edit out your equally immediate experience of the dog shit.

Or if you're having a bad day, maybe it goes the other way around—the whole city's full of shit and trash! You can't even have a flower without some dog shit next to it.
We're constantly telling stories to ourselves to modulate our experience—usually to push away what is bad. We try to create little worlds for ourselves, throughout the day that are “good.”

What I appreciate about this poem is that it expresses a kind of consciousness which, to the best of the poet's ability, lets each thing come when it comes.

One thing after another: the feeling about the war and the feeling about the cheese she's eating. She often speaks in the poem about food. One time she goes to have sushi, one time she's at somebody's event and they go out to dinner afterwards. Then at the same time she's thinking about the people who in Iraq, in this case, are going without food, or having difficulty finding food. She feels embarrassed by her pleasure in her own life, feels some shame there, which is also part of it. I've had very similar feelings during the bombardment of Gaza, or by what's happening now in Iran, or the bombs in Tel Aviv, as well. This is happening.

This is also happening in many parts of the world that we don't know anything about, because we can't pay attention to absolutely everything all at once. But we can let what's happening within our sphere—both the sphere of what we read and see, and the sphere of what's happening in our mind—we can let it all live there, I think. Or we can experiment with that, in any case.

I'm going to read a little bit more of this poem, where we can feel some of this.



To move forward into parading indifference. To bury one’s feelings. To feel relief at the hairdresser. To stroll. To clean out some memories and allow death to manifest itself. To project the movie of things that just happened, let bitterness invade the soul. To fight regrets and lose the battle. To know that when it’s nighttime here it’s early morning in Baghdad. To think of Badr Shaker al Sayyab. To descend into his tomb to inform him that Bassorah is being destroyed. To wash blood off its people’s faces. To leave Badr to his sleep. To fly back to New York the indifferent, the wounded. To remember Innana’s poems. To call Babylon’s gods. To wish that they join the fight, and know that that won’t happen. To foresee vengeance in death.

To face the iridescent inner chaos. To start a grey day. To lose the limit between the self and its environment. Buy two newspapers in order to double the horror. To reach the bottom of horror. Turn distances into a tunnel. Receive a package. Read Bobby’s letter predicting world-wide cataclysm. Believe him. To enter Time’s movement. To walk around the block. To remove wet shoes. To watch one’s heart-beats. To give up writing the letter, give up everything. To need some sleep. To swallow the pill. To wait for Ruth and Annea. To let the body do the thinking about the war.

To buzz with fatigue. To dream (almost) of canals and planted fields. To climb mountains, but it’s not true. To be glued to the ground. To hurt because they are hurting. To bury the living-dead. To lower one’s mask. To clean the bath-tub with disgust. To feel guilty and blame it on the war. To be puzzled by the enormity of what is happening. To live in a kind of luxury, avoid the idea that it could be different. To wait for the end of that which will not end.



The poem does keep going, but we'll stop there.

To Face the Iridescent Inner Chaos

That line, “to wait to the end of that which will not end,” also reminded me of when we say the Gatha of Atonement in the mornings on retreat or during fusatsu, we speak of the beginninglessness of greed, anger, and ignorance—of our own, greed, anger, and ignorance. And so in that beginninglessness of all of these really horrible things that are happening, there's also kind of endlessness, which is difficult to face.

It's difficult to face. She uses the words “to face the iridescent inner chaos.” That’s what I'd like take from this poem today. From our own experiences—what happened to you today? What's going to happen when you leave here? Can you face your own iridescent inner chaos? An inner chaos which is also beautiful.

I’ll end with a few more lines from the Hsin Hsin Ming.

Later in the poem, it says,


To abide in this world, 
just say “Not two.” 
”Not two” includes everything. 
Excludes nothing.


So. Not two, not good and bad, not me and you, not the world and out there and the world in here.

The world in here is the world out there. Not two.


To abide in this world, 
just say “Not two.” 
”Not two” includes everything. 
Excludes nothing.


 

REFLECTION

The following is an excerpt from “Me, I Am No Savior,” by Taylor Plimpton, which was first published here in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review


                                                                    Photo by Freddy Plimpton
 
As John Tirman, executive director at MIT’s Center for International Studies and author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars, explains, American indifference to war is not necessarily your typical brand of American sloth but instead a kind of defense mechanism, “a way of dealing with a world that is unjust, but shouldn’t be. When wars are first started, the public backs it enthusiastically. When the war goes awry, the public tends not to ‘oppose’ it in the sense of anti-war activism, but regards it as ‘a mess,’ something now to ignore.”

I wonder, too, if the reason we so instinctively avert our gaze from the reality of war is because we’re unable—or unwilling—to come to terms with our own role in it. We live in a democracy, after all—we vote into office the people who make these decisions; our tax dollars pay for our vast military expenditures. We are Americans, and this an American war. In other words, there’s a very real sense that the mass devastation and death caused by the War on Terror—the crushing, gut-sucking weight of those half-million lives lost—it’s on each and every one of us. It’s on your shoulders, and it’s on mine. And so to protest war is to be somehow brave enough to own this fact—that the world is unjust, and that we are a part of this injustice—even if the only thing we ever did was to never say a word. 
***

I should admit that it’s not just saving the world or stopping a war that I seem incapable of: it’s everything. When it comes to accomplishing even the smallest tasks—simple, everyday things that I know would be good for me—I am seized by a similar paralysis. Writing. Meditating. Doing the dishes. (There are times I can’t even muster the motivation to change a light bulb—how could I possibly change the world?)

If I were a superhero, things would be different, though. My laundry—dirty tights, mucked up cape—I’d do it in a flash. And saving the world, that’d be a cinch, too—I’d simply swoop in and tell everyone to get their fucking shit together: “Look, Donald, that’s enough.”

Actually, if I were a superhero, I have a strange feeling I would be my own kryptonite. No matter what super-move I’d plan to super-do, there I’d be, super-standing in my way—sapping my powers and inducing paralysis, lethargy, and indifference.

I have always been my own greatest foe. No other super-villains need apply. 

 


We communicate in three aces online:

our email list, a Facebook page, and a Groups.io list

where we share events and information among the whole

Sangha. Explore these various ways of staying connected and

up to date here: https://villagezendo.org/connect-with-us/
 
 

Editor: Taylor Plimpton
Editor Emerita: Nina Shuka Klippel

Design & Production: Howard Thoresen 
 



In these trying times, the Village Zendo still relies on your support.


If you are able, please make a donation.


VILLAGE ZENDO – True Expression Temple

260 West Broadway ~ New York NY 10013

 








Village Zendo · 260 West Broadway · #1G · New York, NY 10013 · USA

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