Upaya Zen Center's Dharma Podcast Open Dharma: The Three Tenets and the Noble Eightfold Path
9 snips
Dec 1, 2025 
Wendy Lau, a Zen teacher at Upaya, and Noah Kodo Rowan, a resident teacher and Dharma presenter, explore profound themes around suffering and compassion. They discuss the ambivalence of Thanksgiving, connecting joy with mourning. Insights include transforming pain into practice and the importance of non-attachment, illustrated through compelling stories from Nepal and Thailand. They delve into Bernie Glassman's Three Tenets, emphasizing compassionate action as a spontaneous response stemming from deep engagement with the world.
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Suffering Opens The Path
- Touching suffering opens the path of awakening by revealing how suffering organizes us toward delusion.
- Recognizing suffering honestly creates the starting point for transformative practice and compassion.
Nuns Who Felt Pain But Not Suffering
- Joan Halifax described nuns in Nepal who experienced severe pain but practiced such that they did not create suffering.
- Their deep practice transformed pain into presence rather than narrative-driven suffering.
Phenomena Reframe At A Thai Gathering
- Joan Halifax told a story of sharing a hot kuti with a Taiwanese abbess at an Arya Vinaya gathering in Thailand.
- The Sri Lankan nuns' remark 'phenomena' reframed entertainment as non-attachment in practice.