Book of Equanimity
Book by Hongzhi ZhengjueWikipedia
18
MENTIONS
9
EPISODES
7
PODCASTS
Search complete. 18 mentions across 9 episodes found for "Book of Equanimity".
Oct 13, 2026
Berry CrawfordHOST
Mm-hmm.
Paul Gyodo AgostinelliGUEST
You've got, uh, um, well, the Book of Equanimity is, is one that Shishin actually ended up publishing, you know, his commentaries-
Berry CrawfordHOST
Mm-hmm
Paul Gyodo AgostinelliGUEST
... on that.
John TarrantHOST
Hello, greetings, welcome.
John TarrantHOST
So we're talking about this great strange book called the book of serenity which is actually intended as a actually path to serenity or we might say delight in the chaos of life that's how i rather than squashing life down so finding a path through the mystery so it's really not so much getting away from life but in a way entering life more fully and uh The koan is a hundred stories called koans.
John TarrantHOST
The one I'm going to do today is a famous one that you've all heard.
John TarrantHOST
A student was wandering around and came to a shelter with a teacher in a temple.
John TarrantHOST
And the student has this huge opening.
John TarrantHOST
And so that's the story.
John TarrantHOST
And in the commentary in the Book of Serenity about this, the person who wrote the commentary said, you know, Di Zhang, he always put the hawk in a place you wouldn't expect it.
John TarrantHOST
And then he gave a yank, and the fish was caught.
Berry CrawfordHOST
It's
Tess BeasleyGUEST
weird that, I mean, I love there's a great line in the Book of Serenity where this poor student is just trying, you know, throwing himself at something.
Tess BeasleyGUEST
And finally, the commentator says, this person's affinity is not here.
Tess BeasleyGUEST
And you get that there's such a kind of fate and karma in who you find and what they open for you.
Tess BeasleyGUEST
And then once someone's gone through...
Tess BeasleyGUEST
Sometimes it's some, you know, strange thing like cake, it means cake, but, you know, something that's going to potentiate that big Dharmakaya experience.
Tess BeasleyGUEST
And then we have a miscellaneous collection, then the Gateless Gate, then the Blue Cliff Record, and then the Book of Serenity.
Tess BeasleyGUEST
And then past that, it's sort of at the teacher's discretion if they want to do Dongshan's Five Ranks or if they want to do, you know, usually people have taken the precepts in there sometime before.
TokuyuGUEST
And so I wanted to kind of use a koan to kind of express in a certain way the difference of who I felt I was from that first retreat that was the Maus to what happened this summer.
TokuyuGUEST
And this is Case 54 from the Book of Serenity.
TokuyuGUEST
It's Yun Yan's Great Compassion.
TokuyuGUEST
Yunyang asked Dao, what does the bodhisattva of great compassion do with so many hands and eyes? Dao said, it's like someone reaching back for the pillow at night.
Jokai BlackwellHOST
And this is one of my very favorite koans.
Jokai BlackwellHOST
Case 52 from the Book of Equanimity.
Jokai BlackwellHOST
And it's called Sozan's Dharmakaya.
Jokai BlackwellHOST
So I'll read the preface to the assembly.
speaker_0NARRATOR
The following Dharma talk was given by ZCLA's head teacher, Catherine Senshin Griffith, during a week-long session held in July of this year.
speaker_0NARRATOR
Sensei Senshin takes up the koan, Nonsense and the Paintings, which can be found in both the Blue Cliff Record and in the Book of Equanimity.
speaker_0NARRATOR
As in the koan, Sension points out how we tend to look at reality as though in a dream.
speaker_0NARRATOR
She goes on to encourage us to see session as an opportunity to step outside of the more ordinary dualistic ways of experiencing the world and time itself.
Katherine Senshin GriffithGUEST
This is from the Frozen Desserts and Entanglements Hidden Tunes Collection, and it's our prologue.
Katherine Senshin GriffithGUEST
And now we'll turn to the main course, Nansen and the Peonies.
Katherine Senshin GriffithGUEST
It's from the Book of Equanimity and the Blue Cliff Record.
Katherine Senshin GriffithGUEST
Instruction.
Kathy EarlyGUEST
I wanted to talk today about a particular koan.
Kathy EarlyGUEST
I think it's Koan 41 in the Book of Serenity, Luopu About to Die.
Kathy EarlyGUEST
I'm going to change my glasses.
Kathy EarlyGUEST
I'm at that age where the eyes are a little funny, and you have to keep switching things to get everything right.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
You could call it mud, but today it's called fire.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
[chuckles] So I'll begin with a little teaching story from the Book of Serenity from thirteenth century China.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
You know, stories upon stories upon stories.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
This is our Zen way of conveying these teachings and connecting to this lineage, this ancient lineage.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
Um, and here's one I've been hanging out with.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
It's case thirty from the Book of Serenity called Dasui's Ionic, Eonic Fire.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
[chuckles] So this great teacher lived in China in the ninth century called Dasui.
Hōgetsu Laurie BelzerHOST
So this is somebody hundreds of years later whose this story was written down, compiled, and passed on to us.
Kynan SutherlandHOST
no everlasting thing that we can grab on once and for all finally and somehow be rescued from the nature of change and fluidity itself.
Kynan SutherlandHOST
So here's the case, and this comes from the Book of Serenity, Case 75.
Kynan SutherlandHOST
And it features the old teacher Yan Tao saying, And a monk who is called Ru Yan, who later goes on to become a great teacher himself, but at this stage he's a younger monk, and he's going to Yang Tao with a great question.
Kynan SutherlandHOST
And his question is, what is the everlasting reality? What is the everlasting reality? And I don't know about you, but I don't think this is just a technical question.