Making a Culture

The Pacific Zen Institute mission is to create a culture for transforming the mind through meditation, koans, conversation and the arts. And it’s not so hard to have an experience of enlightenment.  But the trick is to embody the transformation, to live in the world that is transformed.

To find out what it’s like to be free, to live inside a mind that is open and free, that’s worth a lot. It’s nice if we can do that without too much effort. One feature of enlightenment is that it’s light, you can wear it because you don’t need a lot of equipment.

And what does it mean to create a culture of enlightenment? It means we want to make it easy to trip over moments of clarity, big and small, and also to support each other to live in that fresher air.

Enlightenment happens to you in a world where there are other beings. The Bodhisattva idea is that we live in a field with each other, and our most profound wish is that we can be happy and hear each others’ joy and find the way. A culture is something we all contribute to.

When we are creating a culture together we get a chance to live inside the enlightened world, not as a static unchanging place but as a path that keeps opening between the trees. The core of the culture is the koan practice and the experience of awakening. There is also the idea that at bottom, we are not selfish, we do want to help each other. In PZI we refer things back to that vision of waking up. As a commmunity we help deepen one another’s practice.

— John Tarrant, PZI Director