Description
WELCOME! This list contains all Zen Luminaries interviews to date, alphabetized by the guest’s last name. Series host Jon Joseph Roshi created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.
Zen Luminaries Index of Interviews
WELCOME! This list contains all Zen Luminaries interviews to date, alphabetized by the guest’s last name. You may browse it by scrolling. You may also visit our KALPA Library and type in your search criteria.
Jon Joseph Roshi of San Mateo Zen and PZI created this series to support the hardworking innovators and shining voices of modern Zen: scholars, writers, poets, translators, activists, artists, teachers, and more.
INTERVIEW AUDIOS
ADA LIMON: ON THE POWER OF POETRY
Ada Limon served as US poet laureate from 2022–2025. A recipient of many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, she will discuss her recent collections, The Hurting Kind and The Carrying.
*upcoming on July 13th, 2026
MARIO POCESKI: MAZU AND THE MAKING OF CHAN LITERATURE
Professor Mario Poceski is a leading scholar on Mazu Daoyi (Master Ma), who guided the great Tang era teachers Baizhang and Nanquan.
*upcoming on June 22nd, 2026
JOAN HALIFAX: EVERYTHING TEACHES YOU
Roshi Joan Halifax is abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her studies span three schools of Zen, and include projects in anthropology, shamanism, ecology, civil rights activism, and dying.
*upcoming on May 18th, 2026
DENISE FUJIWARA: JAPANESE BUTOH AND THE HEART OF ZEN
Denise Fujiwara is a PZI member and highly acclaimed choreographer and performer of Japanese Butoh and contemporary dance. She recently received the prestigious Canadian Walter Carsen Prize for Excellence in the Performing Arts.
*audio not available
JON KABAT-ZINN: REFLECTIONS ON 60 YEARS OF PRACTICE
Mindfulness is an intrinsically ethical stance. At this moment in time, nothing could be more important to actualize for the health of humanity and the planet as a whole.
HELEN TWORKOV: LOTUS GIRL – LIFE AT THE CROSSROADS
I wanted to add to the history of Buddhism in America something of the impolite, naïve, and despairing side of this wondrous journey.
DAVID CHADWICK: TASSAJARA STORIES – A SORT OF MEMOIR
Tassajara Stories is a marvelous and entertaining book and David Chadwick is a tremendous storyteller. We have here a record of his lifelong passion to record the arrival of Zen in California.
THOMAS YUHO KIRCHNER: DAHUI’S LETTERS
Was Dahui the “second coming” of Linji? He shared with Linji a great wellspring of energy and complete lack of resistance to the present moment.
EDWARD ESPE BROWN: HOW TO COOK YOUR LIFE – NO RECIPE!
Nobody teaches you anything, but you can be touched, you can be awakened. Each thing just as it is—what do you make of it?
GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN: SAVING THE EARTH, HELPING THE PEOPLE
There’s a lot of talk about good and evil. And that makes it very hard to talk to people who are under the rubric of evil. How do you justify talking to them? And yet not talking to them is unthinkable from a global management point of view.
DAVID CHADWICK: THE SUZUKI ROSHI LEGACY
Suzuki turned, caught my eye, and smiled, and for the tiniest increment of time, everything stopped, and I saw him. I still hold a snapshot of memory of that first moment of direct contact with the man who had just become my teacher.
PETER COYOTE: FOLLOWING THE RED THREAD
A scrub-jay screamed, “Eeek! Eeek! Eeek! Eeek! Eeek!”—obliterating all thought. Suddenly, its cries were understood as “It! It! It! It! It!” —the indisputable answer to my question. I took one more step, and the world as I had always experienced it ended.
KOSHIN PALEY ELLISON: UNTANGLED – HOW WE WALK THE PATH
When facing situations around death, you don’t know how things are going to unfold. It’s the one thing that’s totally true.
MARK EPSTEIN: THE ZEN OF THERAPY
To work something through means to change one’s view. If we try instead to change the emotion, we may achieve some short-term success, but we remain bound by forces of attachment and aversion to the very feelings from which we are struggling to be free.
MASTER GUOGU: SILENT ILLUMINATION
Thoughts and passing emotions liberate themselves, moment after moment after moment. We don’t have to do anything to make them disappear. They liberate themselves if we let go of what we’re grasping.
RUBEN HABITO: A FLOWER TWIRLED – THE LEGACY OF KOUN YAMADA
A healing spirituality can save us from a sense of powerlessness, and, instead, enable us to discover a source of empowerment for transforming society.
*co-hosted by Jon Joseph and David Weinstein
ROBERT HASS: ON HIS POETRY, JAPANESE HAIKU, & WORKING WITH MILOSZ
Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.
PETER HERSHOCK: THE VALUE OF THE ANCIENT CHAN TEACHINGS
Chan’s mission is to induce each and every one of us to demonstrate our readiness for truly liberating intimacy. It is clear that the contemporary relevance of Chan does not lie in what it tells us about our current situation, but in how it helps us transform it.
DAVID HINTON: NO GATE-GATEWAY AND THE BLUE CLIFF RECORD
Hinton has published numerous books of poetry and essays, and many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy. These books are all informed by an abiding interest in deep ecological thinking, in exploring the weave of consciousness and landscape.
DAVID HINTON: THE WAY OF CHAN
In this landmark anthology of some two dozen translations, celebrated translator David Hinton shows how Chan—too long considered a perplexing school of Chinese Buddhism—was in truth a Buddhist-inflected form of Daoism, China’s native system of spiritual philosophy.
*audio not available
DAVID HINTON: WILD MIND, WILD EARTH
We are unborn through and through, wild mind wholly integral to the generative existence-tissue of wild earth—and accepting this engenders a new understanding of our unfolding eco-catastrophe.
DAVID HINTON: RETURN TO HUNGER MOUNTAIN
Through translation I’ve come to realize that I stumbled upon a way to think outside the limitations not just of the mainstream Western intellectual tradition, but also of my own identity; a way to speak in the voice of ancient China’s sage-masters and for them to speak in mine.
JANE HIRSHFIELD: THROUGH GATES AND WINDOWS
I always feel a slight dismay if I’m called a ‘Zen’ poet. I am not.
I am a human poet, that’s all.
JANE HIRSHFIELD: THE ASKING – NEW & SELECTED POEMS
I have loved questions all my life, in different ways. I’ve loved them out of curiosity and I’ve loved them out of the hunger for good conversations and I’ve loved them out of desperation.
MARIE HOWE: NEW & SELECTED POEMS
Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable. The thing that you can’t really say because it’s too complicated. It’s too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.
LEWIS HYDE: A PRIMER FOR FORGETTING – GETTING PAST THE PAST
Where is your practice?
Is it just sitting on the cushion, or is it your whole life?
PICO IYER: AFLAME! LEARNING FROM SILENCE
The silence of a monastery is not like that of a deep forest or mountaintop; it’s active and thrumming, almost palpable.
PICO IYER: THE HALF KNOWN LIFE
We lead our lives in the outer world, we understand them through the inner. So here are a set of journeys through inner and outer and the places in between.
THOMAS KIRCHNER: MY LIFE IN ZEN
I have a deep sense that this is a really, really meaningful experience. It has given me a compass for my life. With time, I will be able to face death with peace of mind.
OSHO ZENJU EARTHLYN MANUEL: SHAMANIC BONES, DARK GATES
I am neither monk, nor nun, nor priest. I am neither Zen nor Buddhist. I am neither teacher nor guide, nor author. I am a dark seed of a lineage that has resisted annihilation for thousands of years.
SUSAN MURPHY: A FIRE RUNS THROUGH ALL THINGS
There is no way to “save the Earth;” it is already complete in every moment … To save the Earth, we must risk at last belonging to it, being complete with it.
SUSAN MURPHY: MINDING THE EARTH, MENDING THE WORLD
There’s some really deep transforming purpose working through the agreement to share the suffering of the Earth.
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE: FINDING REFUGE IN POETRY
I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime.
FRANK OSTASESKI: THE FIVE INVITATIONS
Through mindful and compassionate care I can share the precious gifts offered by my teachers, most especially the hundreds who have allowed me to accompany them in the vulnerable and sacred time of their dying.
RUTH OZEKI: TALES OF TIME AND BEING
A “time-being” is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.
RED PINE: DANCING WITH THE DEAD
So I’ve come to realize that translation is not just another literary art.
It’s the ultimate literary art.
RED PINE: THE HEART SUTRA
The Heart Sutra is a work of art as much as of religion … distinguishing these two callings is both artificial and unfortunate.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON: THE HIGH SIERRA – A LOVE STORY
We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.
MORTEN SCHLUTTER: HOW ZEN BECAME ZEN – ORIGINS OF MODERN PRACTICE
Schlütter’s work focusses on the most monumental event in the history of Chan, a rift that highlighted an ongoing conundrum: How to go about becoming enlightened when the most fundamental teaching of Chan is that we are already originally enlightened.
*audio not available
HENRY SHUKMAN: ORIGINAL LOVE
I’m deeply convinced that the deepest nature of our reality, that we are apparently wired to experience, although it’s not automatic, is one of a cosmic unity that is here right now.
ROSHI JOAN SUTHERLAND: THROUGH FORESTS OF EVERY COLOR
Sutherland studied with John Tarrant and was made Roshi in his lineage in 1998. Together they co-founded the Pacific Zen School. Over the decades, her teaching and writing has explored how koans enliven, subvert, and sanctify us.
CHASE TWICHELL: HORSES WHERE THE ANSWERS SHOULD HAVE BEEN
I find the internal pressure exerted by emotion and by a koan to be similar in surprising and unpredictable ways. Zen is a wonderful sieve through which to pour a poem.
OCEAN VUONG: TIME IS A MOTHER
How else do we return to ourselves
but to fold the page so it points to the good part?
EMILY WILSON: THE ILIAD – WESTERN MYTH & KOAN ZEN
You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.