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2016-04-26 The Old Woman Burns Down the Hermitage

Another story of a wise old woman, this one from China, date unknown. This koan isn’t anthologized in the three most well known koan collections (The Gateless Gate, The Blue Cliff Record or The Book of Serenity) but it does appear in Shumon Kattoshu (Entangling Vines), a koan collections which first published in Japan at the end of the seventeenth century. Roshi explores this story in this talk: sometimes people think spirituality means cutting ourselves off from life, but that is not the Buddha's way.

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AZC The Hidden Lamp

In this ongoing series Roshi Amala Wrightson explores the stories from The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women (edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon).

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Roshi Amala Wrightson

Roshi Amala Wrightson is the full-time teacher at the Auckland Zen Centre. Amala-roshi began her Zen training at the Rochester Zen Center in 1989, shortly after completing an M.A. in Italian at Auckland University, and was ordained as a priest there in 1999. In late 2003, upon completion of formal koan training under Roshi Kjolhede, Amala-roshi returned to resettle in New Zealand. She and her husband, Sensei Richard von Sturmer, co-founded the Auckland Zen Centre in 2004. The Centre offers regular sittings, talks, zen meditation workshops, retreats (sesshin) and opportunities to engage in compassionate action. All Roshi's talks are shared in our "AZC Weekly Talks" podcast.