July 2026

Explore the heart of wisdom and compassion in two back-to back summer sesshins—July 18th through August 2nd 2026 at Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut.

You may join us for a whole week or both weeks.

In-person practice at our location in Tribeca will be closed during this period, however our online zendo will remain open for those that wish to continue practicing together remotely. For those not able to attend the retreat, please remember that our Ango (peaceful dwelling) period can be a time of intensifying our practice in the midst of our ordinary daily lives of coming and going to work, our families and relations. This is a time when we personally commit to more zazen, study, and other practices, such as clear awareness of our interaction with others and attentiveness to the precepts.

For more information and to register go   HERE  
 

WORK FOR DHARMA DAY

A note from our Treasurer Joshin Roshi: 

Thanks to everyone who donated to our Work for Dharma Day fundraiser this year. 

It's a big help for us to cover our expenditures as we gear up for Summer Ango. Due to your generosity – with contributions from many new practitioners –  we surpassed last year's proceeds. Your appreciation for the nourishment you draw from Village Zendo has been clearly expressed.  And in turn, we wish you all a safe and rewarding summer. And look forward to ongoing practice with you.   
 

TEACHINGS

The following is an edited version of a Dharma Talk given by Ryotan Roshi on June 16, 2026. To listen to the original on YouTube, go here.
 

Dams and Flows

This morning when it was quite a bit cooler than it is now, Corinna and I were sitting at breakfast, and she said something that struck me because it fell into line with stuff that I’ve been thinking about recently. She’s very good at cultivating bean sprouts, growing bean sprouts from mung beans. She’s really got that down. So she thought she would try to do the same thing with broccoli seeds, because broccoli sprouts are supposed to be very good for you. And she told me it was a total failure. She said, “Well, yeah, that’s the never-ending story of the the broccoli sprouts,” and I thought, “Well, yeah, it’s never-ending, because it never began.”

In order for things to end, they must begin. If they don’t begin, they don’t end. No birth, no death. So, in a way, as Dogen always is pointing out, our sense of time is driven by the fact that we’re beings that have ego consciousness, emotional consciousness. We have the six senses, the five ones that we normally speak about in the West—sight, smell, taste, touch, and so on—plus the sixth sense, which is consciousness, that perceives all the rest, and out of these, we attach and we create a story called Our Life, Our Biography, Me. And so we have our time being flowing, and Dogen says that as we live in our time being, today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, and yesterday flows into today. Today flows into today. Tomorrow flows into tomorrow. Flowing is a characteristic of time. 

One way to think about that is in a very short time it’ll be the first day of summer, so the summer is flowing toward us, but actually also winter is flowing toward us, and so is the fall, and we are flowing toward winter, we are flowing toward fall, we are flowing toward summer. So our conventional way of looking at it is, ‘I’m here at the end of the spring, and soon it’s going to be summer.’ And I think like this because in my usual way of looking at things everything revolves around Ryotan—but when I take that out of the equation, I just see a generalized flowing. And what is Ryotan? Ryotan is just a series of moments strung together by a story, and this moment called Ryotan is influenced by all the other moments that have ever been, ever will be. So, in a sense, the time being, my time being, is the time being of everything, and everything is my time being, according to Dogen. 

So this is all kind of philosophical, and it’s interesting philosophy in my opinion, but it kind of became more concrete for me a week or two ago, because Corinna and I took the train out to Morristown, New Jersey, and we went to the cemetery near there and had a memorial service with the family for my cousin Stan. He passed away about a year ago, a little more, but the memorial service was recent. Anyway, we were standing out there in the June sun, and, like many memorial services I’m sure you’ve been to, people had a chance to go around and talk about their memories of Stan, and finally his sister was one of the last ones to speak, and she quoted a poem that seems to me to be right in the spirit of Dogen, and it went like this: 

And every person is a dam between past and future.
When he dies the dam is broken and the past breaks through into the future
And there is no early or late. Time is one
Like our God, our time is one.
And the memory of the dam is a blessing.

                                   — Yehuda Amichai (1924 – 2000)


So, here we have something I find much easier to connect with than just thinking about this stuff in terms of philosophy, because each of us thinks of ourselves as being solid and having an ongoing being, we all feel like dams between the past and the future. We all feel like a point of solid present in between the infinite past and the infinite future. But somehow we can never quite find that point. Where is the present? When we try to be in the moment, the moment’s gone already, so it’s pretty tough to be in the moment. How do you be in the moment? 

So, when a person dies, the dam is broken, and the past breaks through into the future and we realize that our whole notion of time simply comes from the very necessary fiction that we are solid beings occupying a moment. But we’re not. We’re constantly changing. My experience now is not the same experience I had just a second ago. My being time is flowing, and because I see you all on my screen right now, your being time and my being time, I can see very clearly that we share this being time, along with the birds outside on the roof from where I’m talking here, along with the sky, along with the leaves in the garden that are waving back and forth furiously as the wind hits them. We are this time.

Another way to look at it, another metaphor is the diamond net of Indra, which sort of takes it into space rather than time. So the diamond net of Indra extends throughout all space and time, and at the intersection of each thread in the net there’s a jewel: the light of every jewel reflects the light of every other jewel in the net. So this is a spatial metaphor for what’s going on with our moment of being time; it shares and reflects all moments of being time. 

Now you know it’s easy to think that, well, gosh, our purpose is to drop this delusion of having a solid, separate self. This is really holding me back. This notion that I’m a dam that feels so solid; and yet this is what makes us human. The human realm is the realm of delusion, so of course we think most of the time that we’re separate individual beings, and when our cousin passes away, we don’t say, “Oh, well, he was the unborn nature, and he’s still the unborn nature, and blah blah blah.” No, we shed a tear. 

Stan was eight years older than me, so when I was five years old, he looked big, almost an adult. He was 13, and he showed me his trumpet, and he showed me the spit valve on the trumpet, and I thought that was just the coolest thing—that you could open this thing up and shake the trumpet, and all this crap would come out of it. I thought that was so neat, so I remembered that. And I remember at the end of his life, when his illness was very advanced, and he couldn’t speak anymore, but he could function,  he came up to me at his mother’s funeral, and threw his arm around me, and we, we stood there together in silence for, I don’t know, five minutes or so. That’s my last memory of Stan in life. So it’s not about trying to erase the sadness of constant change by some kind of watered-down Buddhist philosophy that’s supposed to make you feel good, or at least feel nothing. No. that’s not what it’s about. What Dogen tells us it’s about is wholeheartedly actualizing this very moment of being time, wholeheartedly coming forth as the expression of the whole universe, but as your moment of being time. So yes, you know, it’s kind of a feeble old man giving a feeble talk, and yet it’s the expression of the whole universe, and it feels exactly like a feeble old man giving a feeble talk, that’s what it feels like. It doesn’t feel special, and yet it’s the actualization of everything that ever was or ever will be right in my moment of being time here. 

So this notion that, you know, we’re supposed to practice really hard year after year, and we’re going to get to some place where stuff doesn’t bother us, that’s a lot of hooey; that doesn’t happen. That would be horrible. That would be checking out of the human realm. Any enlightenment that’s to be found is to be found right here in the realm of delusion.

I was reading Hakuin’s autobiography recently, and he says that when he started studying Zen, he read about the great Tang Dynasty master Yen T’ou—called Ganto in Japanese—and he said that he read about Ganto’s death. In Ganto’s time, the golden age of Zen, things were going completely to shit. The Tang Dynasty was falling apart. It was a great time for Zen, full of brilliant masters, and everything was falling apart. Temples were being invaded and looted. There was civil war. There was anarchy, and so in Ganto’s temple they heard that the bandits were coming and all the monks scooted except for Ganto. Ganto just sat in zazen. When the bandits got there, they saw what a shabby temple this was. There was hardly anything there worth stealing. They were really pissed. And so one of the bandits raised his sword as Ganto was sitting there in Zazen and Ganto went “Aaaaahhhh!,” the bandit went swisssh, and off came Ganto’s head. So reading about this, Hakuin said, “That put me off studying Zen for a couple of years because I said to myself, ‘How could a great master like Ganto scream in such an undignified manner? What’s the point of this if you can’t be peaceful and composed at the moment of your death?’” Well, after sitting for a great number of years, very intensely, very, very, very intensely, having kensho upon kensho and kensho, he finally realized—Oh! 

He realized the same thing that Dogen talks about: It’s about actualizing this moment of your time-being, fully actualizing it coming forth as this time, this place, this person, these circumstances; coming forth as the whole universe, the whole universe was screaming, and yet it was just an old monk screaming. And so we don’t have to be above it all in Zen. In fact there is no above or below, there is only our moment of being time, and Dogen Zenji tells us that to actualize fully, wholeheartedly, our moment of being time is the meaning of practice/enlightenment.
 


TRUE EXPRESSIONS  



Creative Offerings from the Sangha

 

The Knicks: A Delirium of Joy



By Adam Seido Levy

There was no way I was going to miss the “Knicks in Five” game, and I thought it would be fun to watch it outdoors with my daughter. Fusho suggested we go to Orchard Street. When we got there, the crowd was already five rows deep where the largest screens were. Standing on my feet for an hour didn’t seem like all that much fun. 

Instead, we went around the corner and found an outdoor table in front of a bar, where we could watch the game by peering through an open window. The waitress looked at my daughter, who is twenty-one, and said, conspiratorially, “I know what it’s like. When I go out with my parents, I always have to find a place for them to sit.” I made a fake laugh and ordered a margarita.

In the fourth quarter, the crowd grew exponentially as everyone crammed in around us, trying to see through the window to the screen inside. It was like a giant family clustered around an old-school television set, and it felt warm and close.

When the Knicks won, the crowd exploded. I’ve never felt anything like it. We were shouting and screaming and crying, and then we began to move as one, jumping up and down in rhythm, our cells syncing in a self-organizing pattern like a cloud of starlings, swooping and turning, a murmuration, each of us separate but also interconnected, a kinhin of joy, a sangha of strangers on the street. 

Strangers threw themselves into each other's arms, screaming joyously. Fireworks went off overhead. People were climbing the street signs, balancing on each other’s shoulders, hugging and sobbing uncontrollably. They were holding their phones overhead, everyone their own Statue of Liberty. 

It was a communal celebration for the Knicks: their skill, their grit, their underdog story arching towards the rim of history with almost mythic force. It was also an affirmation of civic and political emotions, as many have pointed out. 

It also felt like this was the moment when the Pandemic finally ended. The crowd, mostly in their 20s, the same generation as my daughter, was experiencing bodies holding each other, intimately sharing space and air together, everyone surging in ecstasy rather than in wariness or fear: a community of strangers, a delirium of joy. 

After an hour or so, we decided to take the D Train home. This is a subway platform where people usually are sunk into their own exhaustion, sluggishly getting through the day, eyes averted, just waiting for the train. But on this night, their faces were rapturous and luminous, open to the wonder of the world, emanating an interconnection that is always available but not always experienced—and I took two photographs. 

                                                           Image by Taylor Plimpton

We communicate in three places 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 

   
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