Kigaku Noah Roen: Embodying the Unsurpassable: Resolving the Great Matter of Life and Death

Kigaku Kodo Noah Roen gives a talk celebrating Roshi Joan Halifax during the week of her 80th birthday. He encourages each one of us to look at her life of commitment to compassionate action and ask: How do I want to live? What is my great matter of life and death? Kodo looks around the Circle of the Way Temple and points to how it is an expression of Roshi’s mind and life, manifesting the influence of her friends and teachers, such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Bernie Glassman, and Kazuaki Tanahashi. Upaya, translates to skillful means, which Kodo explains is about cultivating presence and openness through the practices of meditation of living in community so that we can be with the great suffering of this world. Whatever your practice is, let it be alive.