Des Moines Zen Center

04/22/2026

Our new website has been launched! Check out dsmzencenter.org for the lastest on what's happening at the Des Moines Zen Center!

08/07/2025

Check out our upcoming Introduction to Zen Meditation & Mindfulness

A Five-Week Course Toward Peace, Confidence & Clarity

A series of five classes running from September 9 thru October 7, 2025

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A Five-Week Path Toward Peace, Confidence & ClarityA series of five classes running from September 9 thru October 7, 2025

03/05/2025

Due to the extreme winter conditions, there won't be any activities at the Zen Center today. 🙏🏼

01/10/2025

You are invited to the Lay Entrustment Ceremony for Bret Hoken McFarlin

Sunday, February 9,2025, 9:30 AM

Des Moines Zen Center
6901 SW 14th St.
Des Moines, IA

"When you really want to know who you are or what the real significance of human life, human suffering, pleasure is, very naturally you return to silence.

This silence is vast, a vastness that is like spring water endlessly coming up out of the earth.

From where does this spring water come? This is where you have to sit down."

Dainiin Katagiri, Roshi
from "Returning to Silence"

The teaching above from Katagiri Roshi was offered by our Dharma brother, Bret Hoken McFarlin. Bret's practice and manifestation of the Dharma for 30+ years is being acknowledged by conferring upon him "lay entrustment," meaning that he is being entrusted as a formal lay teacher of the Dharma.

The morning will begin with our normal 8:00 AM zazen (no 7:10 AM zazen on this Sunday) followed by our normal morning service. Then there will be a break until the ceremony starts at 9:30 AM. A reception will follow the ceremony. Please feel free to come just to the ceremony and reception, if you wish.

All are invited. Please join us in celebrating this joyful event with Bret, his family and friends, and our sangha!

11/08/2024

“When you know the place where you are, practice begins.” Dogen Zenji

Dogen is not speaking of familiarity with your surroundings. He’s saying there’s no practice at all until you realize the true nature of where you are as being not one jot separate from what you are.

Zen’s deep inquiry into the self is a merciful dissolving of what you are into all that is.

The profound Buddhist teaching on the dependent co-arising of all things and all beings rests in the exacting nature of precariousness.* We depend upon one another. We arise together. We share the same no-ground. We manifest impermanence together. And this miracle of dependent co-arising manifests as the great flowering of life on Earth, which is now enduring one of its most bitter seasons.

The sober recognition that we are slipping into an ever more dangerous place may be the first time on Earth such a feeling can be said to be universal, making the very word Earth into a prayer.*

Susan Murphy Roshi
from A Fire Runs Through All Things
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*precariousness - from the Latin word precārius (from prex, precis, ‘prayer’), to obtain by entreaty, imprecation, calling out.

11/01/2024

When Bodhidharma went from India to China, he met the emperor of China, Wutei. The emperor had great intellectual understanding of Buddhism and asked many questions, but Bodhidharma pointed out that debating and arguing about this and that has nothing to do with the real teaching of the Buddha.

At that time there was only this kind of discussions. Bodhidharma realized that in such conditions there would only be the possibility of spreading the teaching, but no chance to spread the Dharma.

Coming to this conclusion, he went to the mountains and sat for nine years in a cave facing a wall and in that way embodied the Dharma itself. In other words sitting, single-minded sitting—this is the Dharma.

Zen itself is the Dharma itself. This is something you can realize for yourself, ‘Ah, so that’s the way it is!’ That is the meaning of ‘no dependence on words and letters.’

To simply sit and think about concepts which appear in the sutras such as KU (emptiness) or MU (nothingness) and imagine what they’re like isn’t Zen. If that is what people are going to do, they may as well go to school and study various commentaries on the sutras.

Without Bodhidharma, there absolutely would be no Zen sect. Nor would we have ‘a special transmission outside the teachings.’ There would only be argument about the meaning of the teachings.

-Harada Sekkei Roshi, abbot of Hosshinji Monastery, Japan. excerpted from Hosshinji Newsletter, Spring 1995

10/25/2024

One minute of zazen is one minute of Buddha. Your first zazen is your first sitting Buddha. That is good zazen. You don’t need to accumulate experiences to do true zazen.

Usually we only think of saving secret money for our own sake in the moneybag of our thoughts. We are happy when we put some savings in our moneybag, secretly thinking it is our possession. Let go of this secret savings of thought. Then the world of life opens. The self that is only the self is the self letting go of thought. When we let go of saving our thoughts, we are in the world of reality of life.

Enlightenment is not personal savings; enlightenment is letting go of thought that claims things as mine. Casting aside the discrimination between enlightenment and delusion, the reality of life is enlightenment in its true sense.

Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, from Commentary on Dogen Zenji’s Bendowa, Talk on Wholehearted Practice of the Way.

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*buddhapada, Buddha’s footprint, symbolizing his presence on earth, teachings, and enlightened nature. This particular buddhapada rests at Yamadera “mountain temple,” founded in 860. 1015 steps lead to its summit above a small rural village in Yamagata Prefecture, Japan.

10/18/2024

“One flower opens with five petals,
forming a fruit, which ripens of its own accord.”

Dogen’s Shobogenzo Kuge, “Flowers in the Sky,” begins with those lines of a poem by Bodhidharma, Zen’s first Patriarch. Bodhidharma seems to be talking about a common natural event, but in Dogen’s eye his poem has profound meaning.

One flower means one Buddha. The whole world is one single Buddha, the pure energy at the depth of existence. When that energy functions, the human world blooms. Then, within this one Buddha, particular beings appear as five (or billions) of petals. Each thing and every situation is a petal. But those petals are not different from the flower, they are exactly the one flower—Buddha!

Dogen teaches that in every aspect of everyday life there is a magnificent event. Your everyday life is the blooming of the whole world, and all your activities are five petals. Day by day, flowers are blooming: flowers of gassho (bowing), flowers of zazen, flowers of having a meal. Forming a fruit is the great opportunity where a flower, a gassho, or zazen forms its own result, which is called bodhi-mind, enlightenment, nirvana, or practice.

Katagiri Roshi, from The Light that Shines through Infinity

10/11/2024

GUIDEPOST OF SILENT ILLUMINATION

Silent and serene, forgetting words, bright clarity appears before you.

When you reflect it, you become vast, where you embody it you are spiritually uplifted.

Inner illumination restores wonder.

The crane dreams in the wintry mists, the autumn waters flow far in the distance.

When wonder exists in serenity, all achievement is forgotten in illumination.

What is this wonder? Alertly seeing through confusion

Is the way of silent illumination and the origin of subtle radiance.

Only silence is the supreme speech, only illumination the universal response.

The ten thousand forms majestically glisten and expound the dharma.

When silent illumination is fulfilled, the lotus blossoms, the dreamer awakens,

A hundred streams flow into the ocean, a thousand ranges face the highest peak.

The teaching of silent illumination penetrates from the highest down to the foundation.

The body being shunyata, the arms in mudra;

From beginning to end the changing appearances and ten thousand differences have one pattern.

The great function is without striving.

Transmit it to all directions without desiring to gain credit.

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Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091-1157)

During the Golden Age of Zen, Chan master Hongzhi first articulated the practice of shikantaza (just sitting, what we’ve come to know as zazen), although he did not use that specific term.

“His elegant poetry frequently uses nature metaphors to stress the natural state of the lived experience of silent illumination. He emphasized the realization of our already present Buddha-nature through the cultivation of an open non-attached state of mind, silent illumination in seated meditation.” (Leighton)

excerpt translated by Dan Leighton, Yi Wu

10/03/2024

“The Hara is a point two or three fingers' breadth below and behind the navel. It roughly corresponds to the body’s physical center and center of gravity. In Zen it is considered to be the spiritual center of the body.

While doing zazen, rest your attention there. As your zazen matures, the hara naturally becomes the center of your attentiveness. You will walk from the hara, work from the hara, and when you get embarrassed, you will have a warm hara instead of a red face. Little by little, the hara will become the focus of power in your body. When something unusual or unexpected happens, rather than feeling scattered, you will find that energy will automatically concentrate in the hara. You will have discovered the still point out of which comes all the activity of your life.” -John Daido Loori (1931-2009)

Daido Loori Roshi was founder and first abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery. Following both Soto (Maezumi Roshi) and Rinzai (Harada-Yasutani Roshi) dharma transmission, Daido Loori contributed his “radical conservatism” to Zen’s transmission to the West, maintaining traditional forms and practices while infusing them with independence, openness, experimentation, humor, and irreverence.

(from Lion’s Roar, 01/07/2001)
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*Chinese image charting the body’s dan tian, “elixir fields,” ki energy centers. It is said the seed of our potential rests in the lower dan tian, the hara.