Sangha of the Wild: Cultivating Kinship with the Tassajara Wilderness, ZMC 5/21–5/25

Practice Center
Date / Time
May 21, 2025 / 4:00pm - May 25, 2025 / 11:00am
Event Type
Workshops and Retreats
Description

Just beyond Tassajara’s gate, another luminous temple vibrates with aliveness, calls out for our veneration and presence, and overflows with timeless wisdom: the Ventana wilderness. Suzuki Roshi, founder of Tassajara, regarded this landscape as a potent habitat for awakening and the beings within it as fellow practitioners: “Although we practice with people, our goal is to practice with mountains and rivers, with trees and stones, with everything in the world.”

Yet so often, a modern worldview—shaped by notions of hierarchy, human exceptionalism, mechanistic materialism, and isolation—prevents us from deeply and meaningfully participating in the living world. These inherently destructive perspectives, at play for millennia and now exacerbated by high technology, have created a dominant culture that views the natural world at best as a place for recreation, and at worst as “a storehouse and a sewer,” in the words of Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy.

Buddhism offers another pathway for relating with the natural world: a recognition that "Buddha-nature pervades all beings like the all-encompassing sky" (Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra). From this vantage springs an understanding of not only our fundamental fellowship with all that is, but also an acknowledgement that everyone and everything is potentially our great teacher… a Buddha. Furthermore, countless lay practitioners, monks, and sages who have peered through the veil of delusion have arrived at the conclusion that no being is separate from another, and that interbeing—the web of deep relationship—is the truest expression of reality. As Thích Nhất Hạnh teaches, “We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.” These insights resonate with indigenous traditions across the world, and are likely in accord with the premodern, land-connected life-ways of all of our ancestors, regardless of lineage.

At this trying moment in history—facing climate breakdown, profound isolation, and deepening intolerance—it is a radical and revolutionary act to regard the wild and its non-human inhabitants as wise, sentient relatives imbued with rights and agency. This recognition is not only an ecological imperative, but also a reclamation of our own fundamental wholeness and belonging in this world.

In this retreat, we will embrace gestures of reciprocity and kinship with the wild. We will form a sangha of mutual support with the land, our wild relatives, and one another, cultivating relationships for our collective ecological and personal well-being. Through contemplative hiking on rugged and diverse wilderness trails, we will attune ourselves to the living presence of our more-than-human kin—plants, animals, boulders, waters, winds. We will engage in Buddhist and non-Buddhist practices to cultivate awareness of the world as it actually is: alive, aware, and interconnected. And we will encounter ourselves as members of a vast, sacred family of beings, communing in the temple of the wild that has awaited our return.

Fee Information
  • General: $380
  • SFZC Members: $323

Please note that the retreat fee does not include accommodations. Retreats begin at 4 pm on the indicated start date and end by noon on the indicated end date. Visit the Rooms & Rates section and determine your preferred accommodations before making your reservations request online.

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