Two Arrows Zen

03/03/2026

03/03/2026

Today, March 3rd, marks the birthday of Satomi Myōdō (1896–1978), a Japanese Zen nun whose life quietly challenged many assumptions about who practices Zen and how awakening appears in the world.

Born in 1896, she did not enter monastic life as a young prodigy or temple-trained practitioner. Much of her early life unfolded within ordinary responsibilities — marriage, family life, loss, and hardship. Like many lay practitioners in modern Japan, her path to Zen emerged not from religious ambition, but from existential questioning born of lived experience.

Her deep commitment to practice eventually brought her into contact with Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, one of the most influential twentieth-century Zen teachers and a key figure in the Sanbō Kyōdan lineage that later helped transmit Zen practice to the West. Satomi Myōdō became his attendant and devoted student, undertaking rigorous kōan practice.

What makes her story especially compelling is that she attained recognized realization later in life, after years of disciplined practice carried out largely outside public recognition. She was not famous, not institutional, and not seeking authority. Yet those who practiced with her regarded her as an exemplary embodiment of Zen training — steady, sincere, and deeply realized.

Her life reminds us of something essential in Zen:

awakening is not reserved for monks, scholars, or spiritual professionals.

It unfolds wherever sincere practice meets ordinary life.

Satomi Myōdō represents the quiet side of Zen history — practitioners whose realization did not depend on visibility, status, or teaching position, but on sustained attention to practice itself.

On her birthday, she offers a useful reminder:

Zen is not achieved quickly.
It is lived patiently.
And realization often ripens where no one is looking.

Most of Zen history was carried forward by people like her — people who simply kept practicing.

— Two Arrows Zen

03/02/2026

Zen practice is strangely simple. You sit. You breathe. Your mind wanders. You notice. You begin again. Somewhere in that very ordinary process, something softens. The nervous system settles. The constant pressure to figure everything out eases — even if only for a moment.

You don’t have to understand Zen to try it.
Honestly, understanding usually comes later.

If you’ve been curious… tired… overwhelmed… or just wondering what meditation actually is — this is a good place to start.

Come sit with us.

DAY OF ZEN — SATURDAY, MARCH 7
Two Arrows Zen — 21G Street, Salt Lake City

Registration and details:
www.twoarrowszen.org

03/02/2026

Today ( March 1st ), Zen communities remember the life and passing of Dainin Katagiri Roshi (1928–1990), one of the quiet architects of Zen practice in America and a teacher whose influence continues to shape generations of practitioners today.

Katagiri Roshi was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1928 and came of age during the upheaval surrounding World War II. The instability and hardship of those years formed the background of his early life and helped shape the grounded, practical quality that later defined his teaching. Rather than approaching Buddhism as philosophy or cultural curiosity, he entered monastic training as a young man, ordaining as a Soto Zen priest and training at Eiheiji, the monastery established within the lineage of Dogen. There, Zen was learned through discipline and daily practice — long hours of sitting, work, ritual, and communal life.

His path would eventually intersect with that of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, another Soto priest who had begun teaching in San Francisco as interest in Zen quietly emerged in postwar America. In 1963, Katagiri Roshi was sent from Japan to assist Suzuki Roshi and help support the growing community that would become the San Francisco Zen Center. During these formative years, the two worked closely together, helping translate not only language but culture — adapting an ancient practice to entirely new social conditions.

Where Suzuki Roshi helped ignite interest in Zen on the West Coast, Katagiri Roshi became one of the teachers who ensured it could endure. After Suzuki Roshi’s death in 1971, Katagiri continued teaching before moving to Minneapolis in 1972, where he founded what became the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. Far from coastal cultural centers, he established practice in the ordinary rhythms of American life — among families, careers, harsh winters, and everyday responsibilities.

Katagiri Roshi taught that enlightenment was not separate from daily living. Practice meant learning how to cook, work, raise children, grieve, and care for others with full attention. He emphasized sincerity over attainment and encouraged students to meet confusion itself as part of the path. Those who practiced with him often described a teacher of remarkable gentleness — someone who transmitted Zen less through authority than through patience, humility, and presence.

He died in Minneapolis on March 1, 1990, leaving behind not only a thriving sangha but a model for how Zen could live naturally in American society. His teachings, preserved in books such as Returning to Silence and You Have to Say Something, continue to guide practitioners who encounter Zen not in monasteries, but in the midst of modern life.

Remembering Katagiri Roshi today is also remembering how Zen came to take root across this continent — not through spectacle or ideology, but through teachers willing to sit with people exactly where they were, trusting that awakening could unfold anywhere.

— Two Arrows Zen

02/28/2026

Most people imagine enlightenment as something extraordinary — a moment of permanent peace, clarity untouched by difficulty, freedom from the ordinary demands of life. Zen offers a quieter picture.

A monk once asked a teacher, “What is enlightenment?” The teacher replied, “Have you eaten your meal?” When the monk answered yes, the teacher simply said, “Then wash your bowl.”

The response can feel almost disappointing. The deepest spiritual question receives instructions for cleaning dishes. Yet this exchange has endured for centuries because it points directly at the source of much of our suffering. The problem is rarely what we are doing; it is that we are somewhere else while doing it. The body eats while the mind argues with yesterday or rehearses tomorrow.

Modern neuroscience now confirms something Zen practitioners understood through experience: when attention settles fully into a single activity, the brain’s threat response quiets and the nervous system begins to regulate. Stress softens, perception widens, and action becomes simpler. Nothing mystical has been added — the divided mind has simply relaxed.

Zen awakening does not remove ordinary life. Hunger still comes, work still waits, dishes still need washing. What changes is our relationship to the moment. Action becomes complete. Nothing extra is carried forward.

To wash your bowl means to finish this moment fully — to care for what is here without dragging it into the next hour or the next conversation. Enlightenment, in this sense, is not escape from life but intimacy with it.

After enlightenment, the dishes remain. But the struggle to be somewhere else while living here begins to fall away. You eat when hungry. You rest when tired. And when the meal is finished, you simply wash your bowl.

02/27/2026

Maurine Stuart (1922–1990) was one of the most influential early Zen teachers in the United States and a key figure in establishing Soto Zen practice on the East Coast. Born on February 27, 1922, in New York, she came to Zen at a time when it was still largely unfamiliar in American cultural life. Her path did not begin in a monastery, but in ordinary life — work, relationships, and the quiet search for something deeper than the pace of mid-century American culture could offer.

She eventually trained within the Soto Zen lineage and became part of the early generation of American practitioners shaped by teachers such as Shunryu Suzuki. Over time, she developed into a teacher in her own right and founded the Cambridge Buddhist Association in Massachusetts, one of the earliest sustained Zen practice communities in the eastern United States. While Zen was gaining attention on the West Coast, Stuart was helping root it in the daily lives of people in cities and neighborhoods far from the cultural spotlight.

Her teaching style was understated and direct. She emphasized steady zazen, the importance of sangha, and the integration of practice into ordinary life rather than dramatic spiritual experience. Students often spoke of her presence as grounded and quietly compassionate — firm, attentive, and deeply human. Awakening, in her view, was not something separate from daily conduct, but something expressed through how one sat, spoke, worked, and cared for others.

Maurine Stuart’s significance lies not only in the students she taught or the community she built, but in the way she helped Zen take root in American soil. She embodied a shift from Zen as an imported curiosity to Zen as a lived practice — something people could do together in a small room, week after week, without spectacle.

Remembering her birthday is less about honoring a distant historical figure and more about recognizing the form her teaching took: practice where you are, with the life you already have. Sit regularly. Stay with the breath. Let the Dharma unfold quietly, in the ordinary moments where it has always been waiting.

02/26/2026

SPRING SESSHIN WITH MUGAKU ROSHI
May 6–10 • 21G Street Zendo • Salt Lake City

There are moments in the year when practice deepens naturally — when the season itself invites us to pause, reset, and return to what matters.

Spring Sesshin is one of those moments.

We are honored to welcome Michael Mugaku Zimmerman Roshi for five days of shared practice at Two Arrows Zen. This urban sesshin is designed for practitioners who may not be able to attend a fully residential retreat, but who feel called to immerse themselves more fully in zazen, silence, and community.

Sesshin literally means “to gather the mind” or “to touch the heart-mind.” Over these days we settle into extended sitting, chanting, dharma talks, dokusan (private interviews), and mindful work practice. Meals are provided. The structure is steady. The invitation is simple: come as you are and practice wholeheartedly.

Orientation begins Wednesday evening, May 6.
Full sitting days run Thursday through Saturday, 6:00 am – 6:00 pm.
We close together on Sunday at 1:00 pm.

Extended sitting is a rare opportunity. Something shifts when we give ourselves sustained time on the cushion. Distractions quiet. The nervous system settles. Insight ripens naturally. And practicing alongside others strengthens our resolve in ways that solitary effort cannot.

If you’ve been meaning to deepen your practice, this is your moment.

Registration is now open at:
www.twoarrowszen.org

We hope you’ll join us.

— Two Arrows Zen

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02/25/2026

The passing of Coleman Barks marks the end of a life that quietly reshaped contemporary poetry and spiritual culture in the West.

Coleman Barks (1937–2026) was an American poet and emeritus professor of English at the University of Georgia. He became widely known for his free-verse renderings of the 13th-century Persian mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi. Though he did not work directly from Persian, instead relying on earlier scholarly translations, his interpretive versions brought Rumi into mainstream American readership on a scale few could have imagined.

It is difficult to overstate what that meant.

Before Barks’ work began circulating in the 1970s and 80s, Rumi was largely unknown to general audiences in the United States. Through Barks’ accessible, contemporary language, Rumi became one of the best-selling poets in America. Lines about longing, surrender, divine love, and emptiness entered living rooms, wedding ceremonies, meditation halls, and bookstores far beyond academic circles.

His work was not without controversy. Scholars questioned the liberties taken in his adaptations and the distance between the original Persian texts and his English renderings. Those conversations remain important. Translation carries responsibility.

And yet, even within that complexity, something significant occurred.

Barks helped introduce millions of readers to contemplative poetry. Many encountered mystical language for the first time through his books. For some, it was a first glimpse of Sufism. For others, it became a bridge toward broader spiritual inquiry — toward meditation, toward interfaith dialogue, toward the recognition that poetry can function as practice.

Whether one calls his work translation, interpretation, or poetic re-imagining, it undeniably opened a cultural door.

In a time when spiritual language often felt either institutional or inaccessible, Barks made it intimate. He treated Rumi not as a distant medieval figure, but as a living voice speaking to modern hearts. That act — however debated — helped create space in American culture for contemplative thought to breathe more freely.

On the day after his passing, it feels appropriate to acknowledge both the complexity and the contribution. His versions of Rumi moved people. They stirred longing. They encouraged listening. They invited a different kind of attention.

That is not a small legacy.

Here is Colemans translation of
“The Guest House”

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

—-

02/25/2026

Maezumi Roshi’s birthday was yesterday, January 24. Born in 1931, he would have been 95 years old this year. It’s a moment worth pausing for — not just to remember a teacher, but to recognize the life of someone who helped Zen take root in America in a lasting, structural way, not as an idea, but as a living practice carried forward through students, sanghas, and daily sitting.

Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi Roshi was born in Japan, the son of a Soto Zen priest, and was raised inside temple life from an early age. He ordained as a monk as a child and received formal Soto transmission from his father, Baian Hakujun Kuroda. But his training did not stop there. Recognizing the depth of Rinzai kōan practice, he also studied extensively under Rinzai teachers Koryu Osaka Roshi and Hakuun Yasutani Roshi, eventually receiving dharma transmission and authorization in that lineage as well. This dual training would later shape his unique contribution to Zen in the West.

When Maezumi Roshi came to the United States in the 1950s and eventually settled in Los Angeles, Zen was still largely unknown outside small academic and artistic circles. What he offered was not a romanticized version of Buddhism, but disciplined practice — zazen, kōan study, liturgy, teacher-student relationship, and community life. In 1967 he founded the Zen Center of Los Angeles, which became one of the most influential Zen training centers in the country.

His impact spread through people rather than institutions alone. Maezumi Roshi transmitted dharma to a generation of Western teachers who went on to found centers across North America and Europe. From this network emerged what is now known as the White Plum lineage — a living family of Soto and kōan-based Zen practice that continues to shape American Buddhism today. Many sanghas, including those practicing now, trace their lineage directly through him.

He was not simply importing Japanese Zen. He was adapting it carefully — without diluting its rigor — so that it could take root in Western culture. Lay practice was emphasized alongside monastic forms. Psychological insight and traditional discipline were allowed to meet. Practice was brought into ordinary life: work, relationships, community, and social responsibility.

To speak of Maezumi Roshi honestly is also to acknowledge his humanity. His life included struggle, complexity, and difficulty, alongside deep realization and profound teaching. In this way, he reflected the central truth of Zen itself — that awakening is not separate from being human. The path is lived in the middle of life, not outside it.

What remains today is not his personality, but his transmission.

Every time someone sits sincerely.
Every time a kōan is taken up.
Every time a sangha gathers.
Every time a teacher guides a student with care and discipline.

That continuity is his legacy.

To honor Maezumi Roshi is not only to remember his birthday. It is to recognize that Zen in America — especially the form that integrates Soto practice, kōan training, and lay life — carries his fingerprints. The White Plum lineage, and the communities that continue through it, are not historical artifacts. They are living extensions of his vow.

Respect in Zen is not admiration from a distance.
It is continuation.

To sit.
To study.
To practice sincerely.
And to keep the dharma alive in the conditions of this place and this time.

02/25/2026

David Chadwick Has Passed Away

Announcement from Abbot David:

San Francisco Zen Center is deeply saddened to hear that David Chadwick died today at his home in Bali. His son Kelly was with him and I understand that his passing was quite peaceful. We will know more in the days to come, including information on ceremonies and memorials. Meanwhile, there is likely to be information appearing on cuke.com.

If you would like to share a memory of David or express your appreciation, please do so on his In Memoriam page (bit.ly/46sjzZZ)

Our deepest bows and appreciation to David, who was indefatigable in his care for the history and memories of Suzuki Roshi and SFZC's founding years. Our hearts and thoughts go out to David's loved ones at this tender time of loss.

02/23/2026

Cold Mountain — Hanshan in Chinese — is one of the most recognizable figures in the literary and contemplative world surrounding early Chan Buddhism. He is generally placed between the 7th and 9th centuries in China, associated with the Tiantai mountains, though details of his life remain uncertain. What survives with clarity are his poems, preserved in later collections and transmitted through both literary and Zen communities.

Hanshan did not establish a formal teaching lineage and was not known as a monastery abbot. Instead, he appears in the record as a reclusive poet living in the mountains, writing about daily life, solitude, impermanence, and the limits of worldly ambition. His work circulated widely in East Asia and was later embraced by Chan and Zen practitioners for its directness and lack of ornament.

He is often depicted alongside the figure Shide, another eccentric personality connected with the same region. Together they became emblematic of a strand of Chinese Buddhist culture that valued simplicity, naturalness, and distance from institutional authority.

The poems attributed to Cold Mountain are notable for their range. Some describe the physical environment of mountain life — weather, terrain, seasons. Others reflect on aging, futility, and the instability of status and reputation. Many express a matter-of-fact relationship to practice: not as a special attainment, but as a way of living without excess or pretense.

Later Zen communities preserved his verses not as doctrinal teaching but as literary expressions of a mind at ease outside conventional frameworks. His writing rarely attempts to explain Buddhism. Instead, it reflects the perspective of someone who has stepped away from social striving and found sufficiency in ordinary conditions.

For this reason, Cold Mountain continues to appear in Zen culture — in poetry, calligraphy, and monastic reading — not as a system-builder or founder, but as a voice. His importance lies less in biography and more in the tone of his work: spare, observant, and uninterested in spiritual display.

The poems endure because they point to a recognizable human situation — a life simplified, attention turned toward what is immediate, and a steady awareness of change

————-

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain
Cold Mountain: there's no through trail.
In summer, ice doesn't melt
The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.
How did I make it?
My heart's not the same as yours.
If your heart was like mine,
You'd get it and be right here.
— Translated by Red Pine