Kansas Zen Center

09/07/2026

What is Buddha?

~ Zen Master Arne Schaefer 🪬

~ Dresden Zen Center, Germany 👁️

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09/07/2026

The world we know is a small part of a vast universe in which creatures of different realms mix freely, and all beings have not only the possibility of buddhahood but the nature of buddhahood baked into their essential being.

Indra’s net is an image. It makes no claims to literal truth. But it has extraordinary power. Indra’s net gets the point across. If we all lived with the consciousness of the underlying reality that Indra’s net points to, our world would look very different.

It is easy to take some of this imagery and see it as somehow anticipating modern physics—what else is Buddhist cosmology but a multiverse in which universes are constantly interpenetrating each other?

But that isn’t the point.

When a lesser bodhisattva suddenly manifests from twelve million countries below the one we inhabit (this happens in the forty-second case of a fairly austere Chan text, the Mumonkan), what are we to make of it?

~ Zen Master Judy Roitman 🐉

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09/06/2026

The essence of the Mahayana vision is a universe in which time and space are flexible, and in which beings are neither separate nor dissolved in each other.

In this world, one being can manifest in many places at once, thousands of beings can appear in a small space, and worlds appear within worlds and beyond worlds—Amida’s western pure land is not west of India or China, it is west of our universe.

Without knowing what it was, I stumbled into this vision when my husband and I were writing our wedding vows forty years ago, early in our practice.

We wanted our vows to be not to each other, but together to this world, and found a paragraph in our Kwan Um School of Zen’s morning bell chant that fit:

Vowing openly with all world beings,
entering together Buddha’s ocean of great vows,

Continuing forever to save sentient beings,
you and I simultaneously attain the way of Buddha.

I can’t speak for my husband, but it was the phrase “You and I simultaneously attain the way of Buddha” that caught my attention—how cool, how romantic, even better than the end of the movie The Robe, when the about-to-be-martyred Christian couple faces the lions together. Which is proof that I didn’t understand a thing.

~ Zen Master Judy Roitman 🔔

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09/06/2026

Why Enough Mind?

~ Zen Master Bon Shim 🪬
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09/06/2026

I have come to deeply appreciate the generous, all-embracing quality of the Mahayana vision.

The most famous manifestation of this vision is Indra’s net. I think of Indra’s net as not just two- or three- or four-dimensional, but infinitely dimensional.

At every node in this net there is a precious jewel, and each jewel is different from every other jewel. They are not clones of each other, but whatever affects one jewel affects all of them. Each jewel sends its reflected light back to every other jewel. Each being in the universe is a precious jewel in Indra’s net. Each of our actions is a jewel; each thing done to us is a jewel.

Indra’s net encompasses everything. Kind deeds and evil deeds coexist in this net—this is the part we like to pretend isn’t there, but just look at the world as it is and you can see that this is true.

Nothing is left out—not the things we like and not the things we don’t like. Reality is vast and transcendent, excluding no one, connecting everyone, as intimately as the fingers on a hand are connected.

~ Zen Master Judy Roitman 🪷

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09/05/2026

The Mahayana vision can be ornate. Worlds upon worlds appear, each with bejeweled pagodas, within each pagoda a buddha, flowers raining down, delicate scents, beautiful sounds, magical beings; lengthy hagiographic descriptions of these beings; pages of praise of Buddhas and bodhisattvas so over the top that Yawheh herself would blush to be addressed that way.

And what does it mean to be a buddha? It is not simply about attaining your own blessed blissed-out state. It is about establishing a refuge in which others can become liberated—that’s what those pure lands are about. We are back to where we started: all the many beings throughout the dharma world vow together to enter the great vow ocean, exhausting the very fabric of time to liberate all beings who mutually (“self other”) at the same instant attain the Buddha way.

Times are always difficult, and these times seem exceptionally so. Great masses of refugees across the planet, civil wars, genocide, severe repression of ethnic minorities, xenophobia, epidemic/pandemic disease—these things that are always with us seem to be with us more universally and with more instances of great severity, while the near certainty of climate change’s attendant disasters looms over us.

The generosity and trust of the Mahayana vision offers a perspective that allows us to be clear-eyed without panicking, our actions not limited by shortsighted notions of a self desperately trying to preserve its individual prerogatives. We are not the whole. We are part of the whole. Our own liberation is bound up with the liberation of all. And liberation is the destiny of all.

~ Zen Master Judy Roitman 🪬

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09/04/2026

09/01/2026

More information at https://www.kansaszencenter.org/practice.