Upcoming

From our temple who has long been a refuge and celebration space for the LGBTQ+ community bowing deeply to our differences and need to have equality, Happy Pride! The Hartford Street Zen Center, temple name Issan-ji, mountain name Myō shū zan in 1981 as a space acquired for a Gay Buddhist club on the day of Buddha’s enlightenment, inaugurated the new zendo in the basement, and the Hartford Street Zen Center began to form to serve its community including our allies.

Issan-ji was in the middle, beginning in the 1980s, of a health crisis that swept through and devastated the Castro district community. In 1987 the group opened the Maitri Hospice for those dying of AIDS. And now we have so many years later carried through a pandemic and began reopening our doors again to the community that continues to make our place in our society, one breath at a time.

Please find a safe and joy-filled way to celebrate this time in recognition of where we have been and where we are going, carrying the love of those we lost on our continued interconnected existence. May your life be filled with love and great joy tempered in equanimity regardless of your identity and any societal label you accept or decline, embracing the way with body, speech and mind.

Happiest LGBTQ+ Pride to you as we carry forward this ancient, vital, necessary and still very relevant way.

Daigan began Buddhist practice in 1995 as a Vipassana practitioner, and began to study Zen in 2003 with Ryushin Paul Haller. He received Lay Ordination in 2006 and Priest Ordination in 2011 and lived at San Francisco Zen Center properties a number of years.

His work and practice include many hours devoted to community service as one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (since 1995) and a volunteer caregiver with Zen Hospice Project (since 2003). He has spoken nationwide on sex, sexuality, queer identity, and gender and has sat on a number of boards of community organizations serving marginalized communities. He has lectured at colleges as well as conferences and is featured in Sex, Sin and Zen by Brad Warner.

Saturday mornings we offer a Zoom web conferencing for video and/or audio presence for the scheduled events. 9:30 zazen (you can log into the conference starting at 9am to socialize) for 30 minutes and a Dharma talk at 10:15am, followed by Q&A as well as an opportunity to check in and see how you are doing. Please click here to be routed to our Zoom gathering.

*** If not otherwise noted in our update section, Saturday Dharma talks will still occur and the Speaker will be our Abbot Rev. Myō Lahey***