Why this site still exists

For quite some time I thought about taking this site down. It is the website of a community with a long history. It used to be very much alive, and we met often and with enthusiasm. Today we meet less, and perhaps a time will come when we stop meeting altogether.

Even so, what we received from our teachers is still very valuable: Master Dogen's work, the Shobogenzo, and countless recordings of talks by our teacher Michael Eido Luetchford and his teacher Gudo Wafu Nishijima. It may be useful to come back to them from time to time.

Audio recordings of the talks have existed from the beginning, and most of them were freely available online. If you are interested, I recommend listening to them: they carry the atmosphere of the original talk, the voices of the people, and the way the discussion went. But there are dozens of hours of them. In everyday life few people have a block of several hours for long recordings, and the quality of some recordings is poor.

That is why this site still exists: to make this legacy more accessible, and easier to search and find your way around. Talks are long, often cover various topics, and a title does not easily tell you what a talk is about or whether it is the topic that interests you right now. So I prepared one-minute overviews of the Shobogenzo chapters and short overviews of the talks. Later I will probably add transcripts of further talks together with such overviews, and perhaps I will manage to improve the navigation further.

And if you have a moment, open the home page a few times and watch closely how the ensō is drawn. An ensō is a Zen circle painted in a single brush stroke, a traditional subject of Zen calligraphy; the stroke cannot be corrected, so no two circles are alike. Our brush has taken this to heart and paints the ensō a little differently on every visit. If you look carefully, you will see. Under the circle, a quote of Master Dogen changes with every visit too. There are a few dozen of them, and if you lack the patience for another visit, press the quiet “another quote”. Read them all and you have done a small retreat, minus the sore knees.

Robert Spiegel, editor of the site