The Zen Mountain Monastery Podcast

Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskills has been recording dharma talks for decades, and this podcast is essentially an open door to the teaching hall. The feed features talks from the monastery's senior teachers, including Shugen Roshi, along with visiting teachers and senior students. These are not rehearsed presentations dressed up for a microphone. They are the actual talks given to residents and retreatants, which means you get the pacing, the silences, and occasionally the sound of a bird outside the zendo window. Subject matter moves across the classical Mahayana curriculum: koan study, the eight gates of training, precepts, Dogen's writings, and practice questions that come up during sesshin. Teachers tend to weave personal experience together with traditional texts in a way that feels lived rather than lectured. Newcomers will find the language accessible even when the concepts get dense, and long-time practitioners will appreciate hearing how senior teachers return to foundational material with fresh perspective. The monastery sits in the White Plum lineage through John Daido Loori, and that pragmatic training-focused flavor comes through in every episode. Audio quality varies since recordings span many years and settings, but the content more than compensates. If you want exposure to rigorous Zen training without moving to the mountains, this is as close as audio can get you.