Cloud Dragon

Republished in Lion's Roar, (June 30, 2016)
One of our Western sutras is the children's round that goes:

• Row, row, row your boat,
• Gently down the stream.
• Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
• Life is but a dream.

The image of a human life as a small skiff on the wide waters of the world has been around as long as people have had boats, and the thought that life is a dream is no news flash either. But what does it mean that there is something happy, maybe even beautiful or consoling, in thinking so?

Published in Lion's Roar (December 19, 2015)
"Awakening is a marriage of wisdom and compas­sion, and each has an aspect that is enlightening and one that is endarkening. The enlightening aspect of wisdom is a growing clarity of insight that puts doubts to rest and creates confidence. It's about what we come to understand. The endarkening aspect of wisdom is our profound acceptance of the great mystery at the heart of things, which we can never understand in our ordinary ways but can rest in and be nourished by. This is sometimes called not-knowing mind."

Published in Buddhadharma (Summer 2015)
"What's so astonishing and beautiful about koans is that they aren't intended to describe something to us or even teach us something but to invite us to take them into our lives so that we can experience the same state of consciousness as the characters in the story."

All the Rage : Buddhist Wisdom on Anger and Acceptance, edited by Andrea Miller and the Editors of the Shambhala Sun, 2014
The practice of anger is not a practice in response to anger, intended to manage or fix it, but a practice of anger itself, based on an understanding of anger as something sacred to be handled with care. Zen teacher Joan Sutherland teaches on practicing with anger using the tools of inquiry, discernment, and remorse.

Improvisation on the Edge : Notes From On and Off Stage by Ruth Zaporah, 2014.
"...Ruth's work is for anyone trying to understand the meditation of real life; it's direct and insightful and blissfully free of spiritual cliché. It's wise about how mental and feeling states work, how stories form, and what it's like when all that falls away. The wisdom is earned, and you believe it..."

In the Face of Fear : Buddhist Wisdom for Challenging Times, edited by Barry Boyce and the Editors of the Shambhala Sun, 2014.
"Everything rises and falls, and yet in exactly the same moment things are eternal and aren't going anywhere at all. We need to see with a kind of binocular vision, one eye aware of how things are coming and going all the time, the other of how they've never moved – not as two separate ways of seeing, but as one seamless field of vision."

Published in the Shambhala Sun (November 2013)
"Being crazy in love with awakening and committed to it for every being in the universe is a pretty strong religious impulse. Yet the koans and other traditions in the Buddhist big tent undermine attempts to solidify religion around that impulse. We don't always succeed, but the fact that some keep trying is one of the powerful potentials of Buddhism: being deeply religious, without religion."

The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women, edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon, 2013.
"This book contains one hundred koans and stories, each with a commentary by a contemporary woman teacher, including Joan Sutherland. Collecting these stories in a single volume is a wonderful thing, as is showing such a range of modern dharma voices. Most of the commentators engage with their texts in very personal ways, as stories rather than koans, which is one of the powerful ways to connect the generations. Lovely to fire up this hidden lamp!"

"Being crazy in love with awakening and committed to it for every being in the universe is a pretty strong religious impulse. Yet the koans and other traditions in the Buddhist big tent undermine attempts to solidify religion around that impulse. We don't always succeed, but the fact that some keep trying is one of the powerful potentials of Buddhism: being deeply religious, without religion."

Published in Buddhadharma (Spring 2013)
"It's not transcendent of our ordinary way of being; it's more like we've been living in two dimensions, and now there are three. Strawberries still taste like strawberries and harsh words are still harsh, but now we're aware of how everything interpermeates everything else, and that even the most difficult things are lit from within by the same undivided light."

Published in Shambhala Sun (May 2012)
"In our yearnings for enlightenment, we might hope that it's a state of unfluctuating perfection that solves the problem of the constant change that roils our lives. But if we see what we're doing as awakening, something that unfolds over a lifetime, we understand that each of us is somewhere in the middle of a long walk through varied terrain. Then our task becomes to stay alive to the changes in that terrain, to trust the path as it appears before us, rather than try to impose our map on it."

Published in Shambhala Sun (March 2012)
"Prayer is less a matter of a petition to a specific figure than a request sent out through the net of interconnectedness. At the same time, there's a strong awareness of listening for and receiving the prayers of others. In this way each woman becomes Kanzeon, whose name means Perceive the Sounds of the World. The aim is to have Kanzeon's heart, the heart of compassion that accepts everything. You grow your heart bigger so that everything will fit–even the things you don't like or agree with."

Published in Buddhadharma (Summer 2011)
"If reaction is a move into the partial, a privileging of how we think and feel above everything else, response emerges from the whole of oneself, grounded in the whole situation, with each element assuming its true size and shape. In responding we're not doing something about a situation, but participating in it."

Published in The Book of Mu (Wisdom Publications, 2011)
"The romance of realizing a first koan like Zhaozhou's No is a powerful and beautiful one. It offers us the possibility of experiencing what we know must be true: There is a vast and wondrous dimension to life, whose revelation will put doubts to rest and support a deep and abiding happiness for ourselves and others. ... As compelling as this romance is, it misses something actually richer, stranger, and ultimately more beautiful than the search for happily ever after. Far from saving us from our own lives, No leads us right into the heart of life. "

Published in Buddhadharma (Winter 2010)
"Consider how many sentences you could write containing the words 'dharma' and 'women.' When I put them together, the next word that wants to come into the sentence is 'potential.'"

Published in Shambhala Sun (May 2009)
"For decades, Rita Gross has been a unique and provocative voice in religious studies and feminist theology. The title of one of her books, Buddhism After Patriarchy, was a bright jolt, the simple juxtaposition of those words obliging us to take a hard look at the relationship of one to the other."

Published in Shambhala Sun (March 2009)
"This is how I've come to think of awakening. It's everywhere – as sudden and complete as the crash of thunder on a summer afternoon, as promising as a distant smudge of cottonwoods, revealing the presence of water. There are times of drought, too, when the very idea of awakening seems to have dried up under an unrelenting sky. We might think of awakening as something that happens inside us, but, as with a landscape, we also happen inside of it."

Published in Buddhadharma (Spring 2009)
"We've reached the point where any discussion of Zen that doesn't take into account new findings about its literary and cultural history looks like quaint mythologizing, instead of something that can be refined through new research and deepening insight."

Published in Buddhadharma (Winter 2009)
"So here's the thumbnail review: Read this book. What we know of Zen has been incomplete, because the part about women – their stories and their teachings through the ages – has mostly remained hidden from ordinary sight. Grace Schireson's book is an important contribution toward making our understanding of Zen whole."

Originally published in Shambhala Sun
"The image of a human life as a small skiff on the wide waters of the world has been around as long as people have had boats, and the thought that life is a dream is no news flash, either. But what does it mean that there is something happy, maybe even beautiful or consoling, in thinking so?"

"One of the things I love most about zen is that it accepts that life is simultaneously beautiful and difficult, and it asks us not to turn away from either. It suggests that it is helpful in this matter of being alive in a beautiful and difficult world to foster an attitude of warmth and curiosity; this allows us to live with a more open heart and mind, and to notice what happens when we do."

"Sometimes we change something because it isn't working...But sometimes the tradition itself is changing, outside anyone's control or intentions, into something else it wants to be. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way we work with koans."

"It is from a deep exploration of these three currents – that something we recognize across time and space; the parts of our received tradition we understand to be conditioned and find enduringly useful, or beautiful; and our native expressions of Zen, both from the western tradition and in our own practices now – that we can help create a Zen of this time and place."

"Deciding to participate in a ceremony of taking refuge in the bodhisattva way is a deeply personal matter: It's a request that rises from the heart, usually to acknowledge the sense of coming home one has found in the practice, and the desire to live a life that is beneficial to oneself and others, a life of greater kindness."

On KSFR's Living Juicy, Rhea Goodman interviews performance artist Ruth Zaporah, media artist Deborah Fort, and koan master Joan Sutherland about their upcoming improvisational collaboration, Warning to Wonder.

Published in Buddhadharma (Spring 2012)
"One of the offerings we can make to the world at large is the practices that have developed within Buddhism, and one of these practices is to ask questions rather than make statements. Approaching political engagement as a series of questions and explorations is very different from approaching it with position papers or assumptions that you already know what something means."

Published in Present Magazine (Winter 2011)
"I was interested that it was Dahui's willingness not to impose the received tradition about how you work with koans, but rather to listen to her experience and be flexible in regard to opening up the tradition to include her experience. It caused a revolution in the way we work with koans that persists almost a thousand years later."

Baccalaureate Address, Colorado College
"What does it mean to be alive in a universe that's like a vast sea, and everything we know and experience is no more than the sunlit foam on the surface of the waves of that sea? And how is it that that sunlit foam--the world as we experience it--is so terribly lovely and so awesomely difficult, all at the same time?"

"These paintings gave me the light of my childhood, which I knew in my cells but wasn't aware of. So I had the world, and my own life, in a way I didn't before, because I became conscious of something, and could articulate something, which had until then been immensely important but unconscious. And this is how koans can work: They illuminate the essential nature we already are but lose touch with. They too can give us the world, and our own lives, in ways we didn't have them before."

"Between the world of form and the world of emptiness there is another world, the world of the dreaming of all things. It is the place we are never alone, where all beings interpenetrate and transform each other, where life dreams itself into existence moment by moment, over and over again."

"If the prerequisite for happiness and sanity is to have this ideal life, all of us are doomed, because no one, not a single one of us, does...This is exactly the kind of delusion our practice is about letting go of. Not so we can come into some kind of perfect life, but so we can come into relationship with what is actually true about life...This is human life. Exactly this. The vastness throws up redwoods and skyscrapers and killer whales and human beings who are exactly like this, and it is not a mistake."

"So what is your enlightenment? it is the place you came from when you were born and it is the place you will return when you die. It is home. The particular wave that is you rises and falls for such a brief moment from that great ocean of essential nature, and that wave is entirely ocean, is home itself. As children the taste of salt water still lingers in our mouths, but as we grow older the memory of ocean recedes, leaving a feeling of longing, of inexplicable exile, in its wake."

A Garland of Feminist Reflections : Forty Years of Exploration by Rita Gross
Reviewed by Joan Sutherland, Published in Shambhala Sun (May 2009)
Dr. Rita Gross, feminist scholar and Buddhist practitioner, has died. She was a brilliant, fierce pioneer in the sometimes explosive meeting between feminism ("the radical proposition that women are human beings") and Buddhism ("Buddhism has the best tools I know of to deconstruct and dismantle attachment to gender roles"). A few years ago a collection of her life's work, A Garland of Feminist Reflections, was published, and I reviewed it in Shambhala Sun. Here's a link to that review, which I offer as a small acknowledgement of how much everyone who cares about the Dharma is indebted to her.