A Fire Runs through All Things

At a time of ecological emergency, Zen koans show us how crisis itself can reveal the regenerative openness of life, mind, and being.

Zen koans are a tradition of holistic inquiry based on “encounter stories” from East Asia’s most radical Buddhist tradition. Turning this form of inquiry toward the climate crisis, Zen teacher Susan Murphy contends that koans can help us enter the mind of not-knowing, from which acceptance and possibility freely emerge. Koans reveal intimate, creative, mythic, artful, playful, provocative, humorous, and fierce ways to engage the work and art of protecting and healing ourselves and our world. To see crisis through koans, and as a koan, is to break the frame called “problem” and find instead an original wholeness.  

In addition to delving deeply into the koan tradition through dozens of traditional koans, this book also illuminates the little-known Zen resonance with the oldest continuous body of indigenous wisdom on earth, summed up in the subtle Australian Aboriginal word Country. Murphy draws from her study and coteaching with Dulumunmun, Uncle Max Harrison, a distinguished Yuin Elder, to show how this millennia-deep taproot of intelligence confirms the aliveness of the earth and the kinship of all beings.