Table of Contents

• To Our Dear Sangha

  • Announcements

    • Upcoming Schedule

    • Change in Participation Fee

    • Online Zazenkai with Inoue Kando Roshi

    • Please help us by answering our questionnaire

    • We are going to start making videos!

  • Jisho-san's Teisho: No Matter the Country or Era, Truth does not Change

  • Madoka's Memo: There is no, "and therefore I should..."

  • Please Share Our Newsletter!

To Our Dear Sangha

This month, we have some important announcements, so please do not skip the announcement section. We are changing our fees, Kando Roshi will have an online zazenkai with English interpretation (this is rare!), and we still need your help with feedback.

To those who filled out our questionnaire, thank you so very much! Your input was incredibly helpful and informative. To those who haven’t responded yet, if you could spare even just a few minutes to give us even simple feedback off the top of your heads, we would be very grateful. The link to the questionnaire is in the section below.

Announcements

Upcoming Zazenkai Schedule (Japan time):

Online Zazenkai reservations can be made here:  
https://www.zen-online.info/reservations

Very Useful Time Converter to calculate zazenkai in your local time
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

1. Zazenkai with Jisho Matsumoto:
   August 9 (Sun) 18:00-22:00
   August 17 (Mon) 8:00a.m.-12:00 noon
   September 6 (Sun) 19:00-23:00
   September 29 (Mon) 8:00 a.m.-12:00 noon
   October 4 (Sun) 19:00-23:00
   October 26 (Mon) 8:00 a.m.-12:00 noon

   **Weekend times are generally more convenient for Europe, Africa, and Asia. Mondays in Japan are Sundays in N/S America and Oceania.

2. Online Zazenkai with Madoka (free):
   Every Thursday night, 9:00pm-10:00pm Japan time.  Anyone is welcome!
   Monday mornings (Aug 3rd, 24th, 31st) at 9:00am-10:00am Japan time.

3. In-Person Zazenkai with Madoka in Nishinomiya, Japan (click for details)
   August 8th (Sat) 10:00-16:10
   September 13 (Sun) with Inoue Kando Roshi, 10:00-16:10

Change in Participation Fee

From September 2026, the participation fee for online zazenkai with Jisho Matsumoto will become 5,000 yen (approx 30 USD). It is 4 hours with as much explanation and Q&A as you need. Your payment is a tremendous support and enables us to continue our zazenkai. If this fee is prohibitive for you, however, please please please do not hesitate to let us know. We will reduce or waive it as necessary. We do not want the fee to be an obstacle to receiving instruction that has transformed many people’s practice and enabled some to actually conclude their search and become clear on Truth (satori).

Online Zazenkai with Inoue Kando Roshi

In our March 2026 issue of our newsletter (#18), we announced a new English translation of Inoue Kando Roshi’s teisho. Kando Roshi is Jisho-san’s teacher and holds zazenaki and sesshin throughout Japan and online, though primarily in Japanese.

On the 6-month and 1-year anniversary of the release of his book in English, Kando Roshi will hold an online zazenkai with English interpretation by Rena Sugita, the translator of his book. The dates are 27 Sep 2026 and 28 March 2027. Please see this site for details.

Please help us by answering our questionnaire

We are in the process of reviewing our past activities to improve our future offerings. If you could spare even 5 minutes to respond, we would be very grateful! This is the link to the questionnaire: https://forms.gle/6FMXWWGFHRieb2596 

To those who have already responded, thank you so very much! Your feedback was truly helpful.

We are going to start making videos!

We are going to start making videos to upload on YouTube. When we do, I will provide links to them in this newsletter. We hope this will be useful for people who are interested to practice zazen but cannot attend our zazenkai. We actually just recorded a video yesterday, and I must say, we need more practice. If you choose to watch our videos, I hope they will support your practice in spite of us not being very good on camera. We will get better with time!

(Translated by Madoka)

No Matter the Era or Country, Truth does not Change

The Truth that I am conveying is the content of what is actually happening right now. The content of what is actually happening right now is ●. When there is ●, there is ●. If someone says “good morning,” immediately it is “good morning.” And if a cat says “meow,” it is “meow.”

The explanation that meow is what cats say is not the Truth I am pointing to. I want to convey that it is the actual meow itself that is Truth. 

Why can meow be called Truth? Because when there is meow, there is only meow. “There is only meow” means there is no “I” hearing the meow. There is only the meow itself.

Since there is only meow itself, there is nothing else to compare it to. This makes it absolute, and there is nothing relative about it. This is why we say it is Truth.

When there is meow, it is meow, no matter what country or era it may be. One might think that the world is a turbulent place or we live in a volatile era. But even so, there is the immutable Truth of what is actually real now. There is refuge in this Truth, here, now. This Truth cannot betray you and contains no falsehood.

Meow 

If you want to awaken to know meow as Truth, please do zazen. With satori, you will know it for yourself, with no room for doubt.

Zazen can be done in your current everyday life, and it can be done by anyone anywhere. If you are interested, please join us at our online zazenkai. My explanations are to enable you to do zazen as quickly as possible.

Sometimes I recommend zazenkai participants to confirm if their zazen is actually zazen. I recommend this because in some cases, people think they are doing zazen when they are actually trying to do nothing, or are trying to do something unnecessary. Zazen and dokusan (one-on-one Q&A with a Zen master) are the two wheels of practice.

I look forward to your participation.

There is no, “and therefore I should…”

My father recently had surgery. It went well and he is recovering, but when the doctor was explaining the risks, it sounded like we could lose him.

This added a degree of stress to the whole experience, and may have made me feel more tense when hearing my Dad say, “Oh! Pain!” when I was sitting beside his bed at the hospital.

Having practiced zazen for some time now, I know that “Oh! Pain!” is “Oh! Pain!” So what does this mean in practice? Does it mean that I should therefore stay calm and unperturbed? Or that I should therefore accept reality and not be attached to a certain outcome? Or that I should therefore forget about myself and be compassionately attentive to my father?

I used to wonder a lot about things like that. I wanted to know the enlightened way to think and act so that I could get closer to enlightenment. But at some point, I realized that imagining how an enlightened person would think was not helpful, because enlightenment is not a recipe for a certain way of thinking or behaving. I have met three enlightened Zen masters, and their personalities are very different. Although they all convey the same Truth, the ways they teach are different. They are in perfect alignment when it comes to what Truth is, but other than that, they don’t necessarily agree on everything all the time.

So, “Oh! Pain!” is “Oh! Pain!” But there is no “and therefore, I should…” to follow. Even thinking about making “Oh! Pain!” a practice is rather silly. By the time I am aware of “Oh! Pain!”, it is already gone. So rather than try to develop the right attitude around it, it is probably better to ask my father if he is okay.

Please Share Our Newsletter! 

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Love and Gassho _/\_