The Zoom link to participate in this event will be provided at least 24 hours before it begins. Please call 415-354-0360 if you have any questions.
Four Thursdays, October 29–November 19, 6:00 pm–8:00 pm PT
How can an 8th-century Zen poem illuminate some of the deepest challenges of the 21st century? The Sandokai (“Harmony of Difference and Equality”) takes up one of humanity’s oldest and most enduring questions: How can reality be both one and many—unified yet diverse, ordered yet ever-changing?
The Sandokai invites us beyond the habitual oppositional thinking that shapes and limits our lives: self and other, unity and diversity, inclusion and exclusion, certainty and uncertainty, harmony and conflict. For more than twelve centuries, it has expressed the heart of the Soto Zen understanding and practice of total dynamic inclusion, wholeness and fundamental equality within difference.
In this four-session online class, we will explore the origins and enduring significance of the Sandokai, its influence on the teachings of Eihei Dogen, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi and the practices of the Soto Zen school, and its continuous relevance in a world marked by conflict, uncertainty, fragmentation, and suffering.
Through careful reading, discussion, and application to contemporary life circumstances, we will explore how this remarkable poem offers “hidden” practical guidance for living and practicing with wisdom and compassion, in ways that can heal both fracture and erasure.
Along the way, we will occasionally draw upon the Western alchemical understanding of the coniunctio—the transformative union of apparent opposites and opening into a fuller and more vital expression of wholeness—as a complimentary way of appreciating the processes of integration, maturation, and awakening that a sustained Zen practice can foster.
Rather than interpreting the Sandokai through another tradition, reflections upon the coniunctio will simply offer additional language and perspective for recognizing a transformative movement that practitioners in both the East and West have experienced and described in their own distinct ways over the centuries.
Recordings:
All course sessions will be recorded, and registered participants will receive temporary access to the recordings for later viewing.
- Benefactor Ticket Price: $280 — supports others’ participation
- Standard ticket price: $224 — covers full program costs
- Member (Become an SFZC Member): $202 — for current SFZC members
- Supported: $134 — community supported rate
- Deeply Supported: $56 — for broadest accessibility
- Current SFZC residents and qualified SFZC retirees may attend this course for free. To register, please email onlineprograms@sfzc.org at least 72 hours before the program begins.
Or call 415-354-0360.
