To Learn More

Zen has always been offered freely, and a remarkable wealth of it now lives online, given without charge by the teachers and communities who carry the tradition. Below is a small, trustworthy starting place. We point you to the source rather than reproducing it, so that your gratitude, and your support, can go where it belongs.

Talks and teachings

The San Francisco Zen Center keeps a vast public library of recorded talks, offered under an open license, and it is the headwater of our own lineage. Closer to that source, the Chapel Hill Zen Center, where the two of us practice, shares the schedule and teaching of the only Soto temple in Suzuki Roshi’s line in the southeastern United States. For more, the Dharma Field Zen Center in Minneapolis and Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe both maintain deep, freely available archives of Soto teaching.

Learning to sit

If you would like guided instruction before you join us, the San Francisco Zen Center offers recorded meditation instruction within the same archive above, a gentle and reliable companion to the written guide on this site.

The wider stream

Two superb free archives sit just outside the Zen tradition, in the closely related world of Insight, or Vipassana, meditation: Dharma Seed and Audio Dharma. They come from a different branch of Buddhism than ours, and we mention that plainly, yet their teachings on attention and the heart are kindred, and many find them nourishing.

Books to begin with

If you would rather hold a book, begin with Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the warm and luminous classic that opened Zen for a generation of Americans, and its companion Not Always So. To go deeper into the practice of just sitting, Kosho Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought and Dainin Katagiri’s Returning to Silence are steady guides. For a clear, grounded introduction to the path as a whole, Robert Aitken’s Taking the Path of Zen serves well. We recommend buying these from a local bookshop or borrowing them from your library.

If anything here moves you, the simplest next step is still the oldest one. Come and sit.