Cloud Dragon

We don't have a temple in the usual sense. Where we gather and what we'll pass on is made of our dharma, our lives, and our art. And so this website is a part of our temple of the imagination — the pamphlet rack in the foyer, maybe — helping to spread something we hold dear through the fields of time and space.

Cloud Dragon : The Joan Sutherland Dharma Works was created to make the groundbreaking teachings of Joan Sutherland, Roshi widely available. Her work is a fresh imagining of the koan tradition, rooted in its original understanding of all of life as a process of awakening. Endarkenment is as essential as enlightenment to awakening, and much of her work is an exploration of the power held in the radiance of the dark.

Since her retirement in 2014, Cloud Dragon is the place to access Joan Sutherland's writings, videos, and the audio archive of her talks and readings, as well as a growing body of transcripts of those talks. For ongoing practice there’s The Open Source network of communities, led by her dharma heirs. See the window below, Places to Go, for more information.

Announcements

Radiant Light Conference: What Zen Women Carry Into the World
Benediktuschof, Germany, August 28-31, 2025
Joan will give an online talk,Endarkenment & the Lunar Dharma.

Recent Online Talks

Joan Sutherland, Interview and Q&A with Jon Korp
Sit-Heads Meditation Group, 2023
WATCH HERE

A Conversation with The Open Source Community
Hosted by Megan Rundel and The Open Source Teachers, 2022
WATCH HERE

On Awakening with Koans, Joan Sutherland and Megan Rundel
California Institute of Integral Studies, 2022
WATCH HERE

Zen Luminaries : Joan Sutherland in Conversation with Jon Joseph
Pacific Zen Institute, 2022
WATCH HERE


Gates, our Miscellaneous Koans collection, is now available free of charge as a PDF in the old Acequias & Gates format.