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.
Tuesdays, September 8–November 24, 2026
12:00–1:30 pm PT / 3:00–4:30 pm ET
A twelve-week practice-and-study program on the Sixteen Bodhisattva Precepts, exploring ethical life as a dynamic practice of radical relationality, responsibility, and collective liberation.
The sixteen bodhisattva precepts help us recognize the many ways harm arises, while also pointing toward our capacity for collective liberation.
As transmitted in Soto Zen traditions, the precepts offer concrete guidance on our actions in the world and can also be engaged as bottomless koans of ethical participation. In this way, we will explore:
- How might we meet the truth that everything we do matters with courage, clarity, and compassion?
- What happens if we take up a loving and committed effort to engage the precepts situation after situation, moment after moment, and grapple with what is a skillful response?
- How do we feel into an uncomfortable, alive, nuanced, connected middle ground of complicity, inescapably part of the suffering of the world, enacting connection and opening potentials for liberative agency?
Looking at the precepts through the lens of radical relationality, ethical life itself is a matter of process and becoming. The emergent nature of ethical participation can come to intertwine in this day and age with contemporary conversations around race, power, patriarchy and ecological justice. Dynamic, creative inquiry is part of caring for the ever-changing meaning and significance of living precepts.
This class includes recommended reading, talks, and group discussion. We will study and practice the precepts through our lived experience and what unfolds between us. We will look at the precepts with a recognition of the intersections of individual, interpersonal, collective, and ancestral perspectives.
Recordings:
All course sessions will be recorded, and registered participants will receive temporary access to the recordings for later viewing.
- Benefactor Ticket Price: $567
- General ticket price: $437
- Member (Become an SFZC Member): $408
- Supported: $273
- Deeply Supported: $113
- 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.
Installment Payment Option
Installment payment plans are available for the General and Member ticket prices for this course. These options allow participants to register now and pay the course fee in scheduled monthly installments. Installment payments are processed automatically using the participant’s saved payment method.
To register using an installment payment option, please use the link below.
Register with Installment Payment Plan
To pay in full, please use the registration button below.
Or call 415-354-0360.
