Pacific Zen Institute

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Pacific Zen Institute

We use Zen koan meditation, art and conversation toward this end. Other centers and groups can be found on our website, pacificzen.org.

PZI operates from the simple yet profound discovery that awakening can happen in this very life, at this very moment, rather than in some other life at some other time. Our two main centers are The Santa Rosa Creek Zen Center at santrarosazen.org, and Rockridge Meditation Community at oaklandzen.org. After 20 years of teaching koans in a classical way, John Tarrant, the founder of PZI, developed a new way of teaching koans in a setting that requires no experience with meditation or Zen. The emphasis is on taking one step into freedom. Everything we do is directed to that end. We hold 7-day and 1-day retreats devoted to freeing the mind. We also have small group seminars on koans. As a community we help deepen one another's practice, often without really trying. PZI holds weekly gatherings online see pacificzen.org/events

04/11/2026

Atwill, Beasley, and Tarrant teaching on a good Sunday.

Yunmen asked the assembly, “I don’t ask about before the time of the full moon. What about after the full moon? He himself replied, “Every day is a good day.”

This koan is like a bowl; the emptiness inside is what makes it beautiful. If you don’t hold onto things, you will see that this life now is what you were born for; your kitchen is a palace, and your hallway is a palace, and you move around with a blessing on your head, a blessing that you can pass on to everyone you meet.

Join us for a good Sunday.

—John Tarrant, Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen with John Tarrant, Allison Atwill, & Tess Beasley – April 12th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

03/28/2026

MARCH 29th Deep Sit Sunday Zen: The Hazy Moon of Spring

Meditation can’t be praised enough.
The benefits of generosity and discipline,
prayer, self-reflection, and practice,
have their source in meditation.

With what we gain from just one sitting,
all our crimes are wiped away.

—Hakuin Ekaku

Enlightenment happens inside this life that we have. It’s not some other more satisfactory life with special conditions. So you set off!

You go through one archway, and then you go through a second, and then a third archway, and eventually your worries fall away, though you didn’t ask them to, all desperation falls away and any cause of suffering in the mind is illuminated. Life after life you have been doing this and it’s not a surprise that you come eventually to the Buddha, who is sitting on an ordinary zafu smiling, and Buddha says, “Yes, that’s it, you are doing it alright, just do zazen like that!” and happiness comes over you.

Meditation is also extra good if you do it together with friends.

Join us this Sunday as we take up the koan:

Though you find clear waters ranging to the vast blue sky in autumn;
How can it compare with the hazy moon on a spring night?
Most people want to have it pure white,
But sweep as you will, you cannot empty the mind.

—Keizan (Aitken & Yamada translation)

Register for Deep Sit Sunday Zen: The Hazy Moon of Spring– March 29th – 9:00am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

03/26/2026

Dragons & Tigers, Oh My!
Our Great Summer Sesshin with John Tarrant & PZI Teachers

Mount Madonna Center
Watsonville, California
June 8th–14th, 2026

Dragons and tigers, hidden and crouching, and bears, song birds, and tall, thin mystics and plump, kind librarians in aprons, and queens who give gifts.

All things appear in sesshin, all things that fall under the law of change and sesshin makes a vessel in which fires and darkness and kindness occur together, transforming us.

Join us for our Great Summer Sesshin!

—John Tarrant, Roshi

Registration now open! Follow the link in the comments for more details and to register!

03/21/2026

SUNDAY ZEN with John Tarrant, Allison Atwill & Tess Beasley: Things Are Not As They Appear, Nor Are They Otherwise

In any given moment, we think we know what’s what, but then there’s this other thing happening, the big lumbering aurochs that runs the universe is just ambling along beneath the surface.

Discrepancies appear between our ideas and experience, uncertainty seeps in, which is far more interesting.

You’re supposed to be happy but you feel sick, or you laugh when you’re sad. It’s why buying gizmos does not console us, because the big lumbering aurochs doesn’t care about gizmos.

Awakening is about befriending the aurochs, even praising it.

Join us Sunday as we explore a famous line from the Lankavatara Sutra:

"Things are not as they appear, nor are they otherwise."

—Tess Beasley, Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen with John Tarrant, Allison Atwill & Tess Beasley – March 22nd – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

03/13/2026

Registration now open for PZI's Spring Open Temple!

Morning Meditation, 5 Days Weekly — FREE to PZI Members.

Wherever you are in the world, let's sit together.

Open Temple Pass gives you eight weeks of unlimited access to two morning meditations, Mondays–Fridays, March 16th through May 8th.

Practice leaders ring the bells and hold a cushion for you.

All are welcome. Join us!

Register for PZI's Spring Open Temple – Link in comments!

03/11/2026

Say A True Word & I Will Stay The Night

Open Mind Retreat at Bolinas On the Sea
with John Tarrant, Tess Beasley, & Allison Atwill

Kanzeon is the goddess who hears the sounds of the world. That is her compassion, she’s not trying to win a compassion prize.

Judi was an ordinary, faithful sort of person who lived in a hermitage. He worshipped the goddess of compassion. He chanted her name and her song, “morning my heart is Kanzeon, evening my heart is Kanzeon,” and lived in a dream. But one day an unknown pilgrim entered. She walked around him three times, she banged her ring staff on the floor. He stared at her, open mouthed. She turned to leave and he said hurriedly, “You can stay for the night if you wish.”

She banged her staff again. “Say a true word and I will stay,” she said…

The true speech of the heart.

Join us

—John Tarrant, Roshi

Registration open for PZI's Open Mind Retreat
Commonweal Retreat Center – Bolinas, CA
May 7th–10th

Find more details and register through the link in comments!

03/07/2026

A student asked Ta-lung, “What is the mysterious?” The master replied:
“The breeze brings the water’s voice
Close to my pillow;
The moon carries the mountain’s shadow
Near my bed.”

The mysterious means that you stand on what has no ground.

—John Tarrant, Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen with John Tarrant & Friends – March 8th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

02/28/2026

On a dusky evening late in Winter, early in Spring, a woman found herself entering a temple. Just why is hard to know.

But a seat had waited for her, and as she tucked in her legs and heard the chorus of soft breathing, her own breath seemed to join in, and this intrigued her.

Then teacher began to speak:

"There’s a Buddha of infinite light in your own body," he said.

Once that Buddha appears, mountains, rivers, trees, and the whole earth suddenly shine with a great light. To see this, you have to look inside your own heart.

This, too, was intriguing. "That doesn’t sound so hard," thought the woman.

Join us Sunday for a tale of awakening to the ordinary brilliance of each and everything. It's nice to remember it's not so hard.

—Tess Beasley, Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen with Tess Beasley & Friends – March 1st – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

02/23/2026

Tonight on Pacific Zen Luminaries!

Denise Fujiwara, one of Canada’s leading contemporary dance artists, joins host Jon Joseph Mon, Feb. 23rd at 6pm PT.

She has won numerous awards for her highly creative choreography and dance, most recently in 2025 the Canada Council’s Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts and Lifetime Achievement, recognizing “the highest artistic merit and career achievement by a professional artist in music, theatre, or dance.”

Denise’s nearly half-decade in performance dance began in the 1970s as Canadian champion on the Rhythmic Gymnastics National Team. She went on to co-found the Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise (TIDE), where she performed for over a decade. In 1991 she founded Fujiwara Dance Inventions to support her solo performances that toured throughout Canada, the US, Europe, South America, and Asia. And in 1997 helped found CanAsian Dance, where she remained involved for twenty-five years.

Some of her many original performances have been influenced by the avant-garde Japanese dance called Butoh, which she began studying under Tokyo master artist Natsu Nakajima in the early 1990s.

“Butoh,” she writes, “challenged the very foundations of my understanding of what dance is.”

Her singular performance known as Eunoia, a multimedia adaptation of Christian Bök’s award winning book of poetry, sold out its Toronto debut, was nominated for several awards, and continues to tour ten years later.

Denise has been an active member of the Pacific Zen Institute for nearly fifteen years. On retreat with PZI, she often leads participants in an exploration of the embodiment of Zen through her lens of contemporary dance.

Follow the link in comments to register and receive your link for tonight's event!

02/21/2026

Special Event – Deep Sit Sunday Zen: Like a Buffalo Through a Window

This Sunday we'll extend the temple hours for another deep sit, silence to sink into your bones.

As the mind settles and we pass through the usual chatter and obsessions, more space appears and like stars in the relief of dusk, more interesting questions come into view.

Wondering itself, and the mystery of our own consciousness, becomes less a problem to corral than simply a pleasure to investigate and companion.

Clarity appears and vanishes again, and slowly, slowly, we notice we're alive and beyond resolution.

One teacher put it like this:

Wuzi said, “It’s like a buffalo passing through a latticed window. Its head, horns, and legs all pass through, but why can’t its tail?”

The tail can be all that remains unanswered in our hearts; the annoying or destructive habits of mind and body we just can't seem to break. It can be all we wish we'd somehow done differently; but to hold it as a given, and come to know its blessing, is the generosity of practice.

Of this case in the Gateless Gate Collection, Wumen penned the verse:

If it passes through, it falls into a ditch;
if it turns back, it will be lost.
This tiny little tail —
what a strange and wonderful thing it is!

Join us for a morning out on the Great Plains.

—Tess Beasley, Roshi

Schedule (ALL TIMES PACIFIC):

9AM – 11AM – Meditation & Music with Open Temple Leaders
11AM – 12PM – Meditation, Poetry & Reflections with John Tarrant, Tess Beasley & Friends

Register for Deep Sit Sunday Zen: Like a Buffalo Through a Window – February 22nd – 9:00am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

02/16/2026

Next Monday on Pacific Zen Luminaries!

Denise Fujiwara, one of Canada’s leading contemporary dance artists, joins host Jon Joseph Mon, Feb. 23rd at 6pm PT.

She has won numerous awards for her highly creative choreography and dance, most recently in 2025 the Canada Council’s Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts and Lifetime Achievement, recognizing “the highest artistic merit and career achievement by a professional artist in music, theatre, or dance.”

Denise’s nearly half-decade in performance dance began in the 1970s as Canadian champion on the Rhythmic Gymnastics National Team. She went on to co-found the Toronto Independent Dance Enterprise (TIDE), where she performed for over a decade. In 1991 she founded Fujiwara Dance Inventions to support her solo performances that toured throughout Canada, the US, Europe, South America, and Asia. And in 1997 helped found CanAsian Dance, where she remained involved for twenty-five years.

Some of her many original performances have been influenced by the avant-garde Japanese dance called Butoh, which she began studying under Tokyo master artist Natsu Nakajima in the early 1990s.

“Butoh,” she writes, “challenged the very foundations of my understanding of what dance is.”

Her singular performance known as Eunoia, a multimedia adaptation of Christian Bök’s award winning book of poetry, sold out its Toronto debut, was nominated for several awards, and continues to tour ten years later.

Denise has been an active member of the Pacific Zen Institute for nearly fifteen years. On retreat with PZI, she often leads participants in an exploration of the embodiment of Zen through her lens of contemporary dance.

Follow the link in comments to register and receive your link for the event.

02/14/2026

SUNDAY ZEN with John Tarrant & Friends: Sitting Alone In My Old Clothes

In the empty room, the spring wind—
sitting alone in my old clothes,
blossoms whirl around me.

Our lives are transitory and everything we meet is, well, vast as well as transitory.

We notice the haze of spring blossoms, the moon, and the infinity of the night stars.

The Zen word for all this is ‘Emptiness’ which covers the dreamlike quality of our days, the way they seem to be transparent, and beautiful. Suffering, yearning and delight are all in one spring rainstorm.

Join us this Sunday for an exploration of freedom inside of the whirl of the world.

—John Tarrant, Roshi

Register for Sunday Zen with John Tarrant & Friends – February 15th – 10:30am PT in the PZI Online Temple – Link in comments!

*Registration is FREE for members and guests, or you may elect to donate $10. Dana gratefully accepted.

Address

P. O. Box 2972
Santa Rosa, CA
95405

Telephone

+15105249575

Website

http://www.pacificzen.org/

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