Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Periods

with Zenki Roshi and the Practice Council

In-person or Online

Annually from mid-January through mid-April

The annual 3-month Everyday Bodhisattva Practice Period is an opportunity to come together with other Sangha members and deepen your practice. You'll be supported by a variety of Dharma teachings and peer-to-peer Sangha dialogue.

As a registered participant, you commit to an individually designed schedule that works within your daily life based on a minimum participation requirement.

The 3-month timeframe reaches all the way back to the rainy season retreats during the historical Buddha’s time.

Practice Periods are led by Zenki Roshi, BZC’s Guiding Teacher, together with members of the Practice Council.

Each year, we dive into one fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo (Treasury of the True Dharma Eye). Dogen’s writings, although difficult to understand, are one of the most complete expressions of how to view and live an awakened life. Therefore, we continue to study his texts.

2025 – Undivided Activity

January 18-April 12, 2025

Zenki Roshi will provide a line-by-line commentary of the Dogen fascicle ‘Undivided Activity.’ It has also been translated as ‘Total Function,’ ‘The Whole Works,’—or for most entertainment value as ‘The Everything Machine.”

The main point of ‘Undivided Activity’ is that to live an awakened life is to experience both life and death (appearance and disappearance) as a manifestation of the whole, interdependent meshwork of all beings and phenomena. Each moment is simultaneously emptiness and form, liberation and manifestation.

The Practice Period is an opportunity for each of us to enter into the embodied concreteness of this seemingly abstract teaching. How can we experience wholeness within our partialness, freedom within our limitations, connection within separateness, newness (birth) amidst loss (death)—right here in this moment?

If we want to enjoy our own lives as liberated aliveness—manifesting moment by moment—we need to discover our everyday activities as a place of practice.