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Come join us in ringing in the New Year with 108 rings on the bell, a fire/purification ceremony, meditation and chanting at our temple-under-construction!
Bring forward your intentions for what to let go of in your life, and enjoy an evening with sangha in ritual and connection.
Come a little early to get settled as this popular evening of practice returns after a 5-year hiatus. Register here.
Pre-Event Prep: 4pm - Optional - to help sweep, clean and prepare Cloud Hall at Mountains and Waters Temple as our zendo for the evening. Dinner break before the ceremony.
Location: Mountains and Waters Temple (Sansui-ji), 2509 Cedarwood Drive in Bellingham.
Cancellation Warning: We expect the portion of the temple we'll be using will be safe and accessible to us on December 31st. If it isn't: cancellation of this event will be announced. If you're registered you will receive notice of any changes sent directly to you.
New Year's Eve Schedule: 7:00pm Zazen (sitting meditation) 7:30pm Kinhin 7:40pm Zazen 8:10pm New Year's Ceremony Approx 10:00pm close with snacks and tea outside around the fire
We'll also be burning any name cards from the altar of people who've died in the last years. If you have any of these from your home altar you are invited to bring them.
We hope to see you for this special evening.
Nomon Tim's dharma offerings from Samish Island Sesshin are now available in our dharma talks library.
These links will take you directly to the talks:
November 8th, 2024, talk one: Practicing With What's Here
November 9th, 2024, talk two: Practice Is Everywhere
To increase the ease and availability of dokusan (private interviews), Nomon Tim has set up a self-sign up appointments system. You can sign up for 25 minute dokusan appointments in the next two weeks at any time and accurately know when Nomon Tim is available.
Zoom dokusan appointments are currently offered:
In person dokusan is also available:
We encourage you to take advantage of the increased ease of connecting with our Guiding Teacher.
Nomon Tim's Bookings Page | Learn more about dokusan
The zendo at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship will be closed the following dates:
Morning Zoom practice will continue as usual those weeks with the exception of the above dates and times.
Please reach out to admin@redcedarzen.org with any questions related to scheduling or anything else.
Held during our One-Day Sit on September 21st, this wonderful ceremony acknowledged Ryushin Kate's life of practice with the transmission ceremony of Menjuhai ("Face to face, Bowing in Completion"). After a peaceful day of sitting with the theme of "opening to joy" featuring a warm and insightful talk by Seiu Hannah, Kate formally shared that she was ready to take this step. Nomon Tim formally declared “The Dharma Gate of face-to-face transmission between Buddha and Buddha, Ancestor and Ancestor, is now realized.” The ceremony culminated with a wonderful Dharma talk by Ryushin Kate. Although the ceremony is named, "completion of practice", Kate reminded us that in reality, "there is no completion--our practice continues on forever...."
We thank you, Kate, for the deep and insightful talk and for your many years of deep heart practice.
The weekly schedule at Sansui-ji Mountains and Waters Temple will include richer offerings for the sangha, with two weekly zazen and study meetings per week:
In addition, look forward to a variety of interesting programs on several Sundays of the month. Sangha members are always invited to organize programs and events themselves! We look forward to the many opportunities the new temple will afford.
Update 10/30/24: The 2025 Rohatsu schedule is currently under discussion by Nomon Tim and the Practice Leaders. We are pondering whether it's a good fit during our construction/transition time to hold it this January. A decision will be announced and posted soon.
Rohatsu Sesshin is a celebration of Buddha's Enlightenment. The traditional retreat is 8 nights long ending on the morning of December 8th when, in the Japanese tradition, Buddha is said to have awakened.
We've generally held our a 2 or 3-day long Rohatsu ending on the 1st or 2nd weekend of December. However, now that Fall Samish Sesshin has proven so successful it has become clear that having another multi-day sesshin a month after Rohatsu to fit into the traditional dates is not viable.
Teachers in Western centers vary a lot around how freely they shift tradition for practical reasons, and there is value in holding to tradition even when it's awkward. In this case, where tradition and practicality have some friction, Nomon Tim and Practice Leaders have decided to honor practicality and will shift Rohatsu to early January.
It will be a time for the sangha to "Awaken in the New Year!". This year's retreat is expected to be on January 3rd and 4th.
Our Red Cedar Zen 8-week Practice Periods have always been in the winter, generally mid-January through early March. Due to challenges in January with snow and infectious disease, starting in 2025 we'll have our Practice Periods in the Fall. Additionally, Fall is a common time for Western Zen sanghas to have Practice Period. And, importantly, this winter we'll have the incredible opportunity to help our contractor remodel our building and set up our temple. (See details for our first construction work party in October here.)
Practice Periods will start during the 4th week of September and end on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. The 2025 Fall Practice Period will run from September 24th through November 23rd. Practice Period will now include the Fall Samish retreat too!
A few key dates if you like to plan ahead for the Fall 2025 Practice Period:
You can enjoy reading Kate's wonderful talk given on September 21st at her Menjuhai Priest Completion Ceremony here.
From the September 2024 Red Cedar Zen newsletter:
From Nomon Tim
Dear Sangha friends,
I've been thinking a lot about this upcoming stage in our development as a community. One important pivot is that after over 30 years of doing our formal practice in shared and rented spaces we'll be the proud owners of our own practice space once we move into Cedarwood next year.
With that fact, and our general deepening of our community over the years, it's clear to me that this new space should properly be considered a Zen Buddhist Temple.
The term temple as opposed to Zen Center or Dharma Hall (or Rented Church Basement!) has a feeling of deep roots. Deep roots in our Zen Buddhist tradition through Japan; deep roots in the soils of our Cascadia bioregion; deep roots in our hearts as we together practice, and live into, serving as bodhisattvas in a wonderful and tragic world.
And temples have names. While we'll continue to be Red Cedar Zen Community as an organization, we'll be practicing at a space, at a temple, which also has a name: a marker or a pointer to something about that particular spot on the planet as well as our deep intentions as practitioners.
So I've thought for a year or two about what that name might be. I've pondered how we practice and where we practice. I've consulted with Japanese priests around the kinds of names that are appropriate and fitting.
An idea came to me early but I didn't want to be too quick to be sure that was it. While temples are sometimes renamed, pretty much: that's the name of our temple from here on.
Then during my sabbatical in July I was sitting on the banks of Gamma Creek at my camp in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area. I was thinking about all of this as I studied Shokahu Okumura's wonderful commentary on Dōgen's Mountains and Waters Sūtra.
Shohaku-san shares that Dōgen was deeply inspired by the work of an 11th century Chinese poem named Su Shi. Here's a poem that particularly moved him (in my translation based on several different English possibilities):
Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors This mountain stream is Buddha's long, broad tongue This vast mountain is Buddha's formless body All night long - listening to 84,000 sutra verses When the light returns, how will I explain it?
Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors
This mountain stream
is Buddha's long, broad tongue
This vast mountain
is Buddha's formless body
All night long - listening to 84,000
sutra verses
When the light returns,
how will I explain it?
As I felt the solidity of the mountain beneath me and listened to the mountain stream's teachings I felt in my bones that the temple name idea I'd been turning over in my heart for a while was the right one. Here's what I chose for us:
山水経 Sansui-ji “Mountains and Waters Temple”
Sanjui-ji includes a clear reference to the Mountains and Waters sutra (山水經 San-sui-kyo) and it honors where we sit between deep mountains and flowing waters as well that at our annual backpacking retreat for 25 years we've chanted this text trailside as we've moved through the mountains and streams below Koma Kulshan (Mt. Baker).
But not just that. As as Shohaku-san helped me see more clearly with his commentary, the mountains and rivers aren't things outside of us. We don't actually go to the mountains and look at them from over here while the mountains are over there.
We are mountains and rivers. We are solid, we are flowing, we are beyond any ideas of solidity or flow. We are impermanent and always changing but we are also beyond such ideas of permanence and impermanence. These are the deep truths also pointed to by the teachings on going beyond birth and death.
As we mountains-and-waters beings plant these deep roots of practice in our local mountains-and-waters soil, may we all feel the depth and transformational power of what we are doing, and what we have to offer.
And so after returning from the mountains I sought input from our Practice Leaders group, shared the decision with the Board of Directors, and am so happy to share our temple name now with you. What a miracle that all of this is coming together! That we have the incredible opportunity to help this world by establishing a temple together.
I so very much look forward to practicing with everyone at Sansui-ji Temple.
Red Cedar Zen Community is a 501(c) non-profit organization.
