Get Free Shipping on orders over $89
A Fire Runs through All Things : Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis - Susan Murphy
eTextbook alternate format product

Instant online reading.
Go digital and save!

A Fire Runs through All Things

Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis

By: Susan Murphy

Paperback | 19 December 2023

At a Glance

Paperback


RRP $45.00

$35.75

21%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $8.94 with

 or 
In Stock and Ships in 1-2 business days
At a time of climate emergency, Zen koans show us how crisis itself can reveal the regenerative openness of life, mind, and being.

PubWest 2023 Book Design Award (Silver)

At a time of climate 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, Susan Murphy contends that koans can help us enter the mind of not-knowing, from which acceptance and possibility freely emerge. Koans reveal intimate, mythic, artful, playful, provocative, humorous, and fierce ways to engage the work of protecting and healing our world.

The koans point firstly at ourselves-at the very nature of "self." Until we hold "self" as a live question rather than its own unquestioned answer, we're stuck looking on from the "outside," hoping to engineer change upon a problem called "climate crisis," all the time oblivious to the fact that we're swimming in a reality with no outside to it, an ocean of transformative energy. Do we dare relinquish our wish for absolute control and fearlessly surf the intensity of our feelings about the suffering earth?

In addition to her use of dozens of traditional and new koans, Murphy 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 Uncle Max (Dulumunmun) 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.

More in Indigenous Peoples

Looking from the North : Australian history from the top down - Henry Reynolds
Narm-Jaap : A Flinders Street Station History - Melissa-Jane Fogarty

RRP $24.99

$21.75

13%
OFF
The First Astronomers : How Indigenous Elders read the stars - Duane Hamacher
Bush Tukka Guide : 2nd Edition - 60+ bush foods and recipes - Samantha Martin
True Tracks : Respecting Indigenous knowledge and culture - Terri Janke
First Knowledges Country : Future Fire, Future Farming - Bruce Pascoe
The Four Agreements : Practical Guide to Personal Freedom - Don Miguel Ruiz
Sand Talk : How Indigenous thinking can save the world - Tyson Yunkaporta
Always Was, Always Will Be : 2025 CBCA Eve Pownall Award Winner - Aunty Fay Muir
Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia - Anita Heiss

RRP $32.99

$26.99

18%
OFF
First Knowledges Design : Building on Country - Alison Page

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia : 2nd Edition - Bill Arthur
First Knowledges Astronomy : Sky Country - Karlie Noon

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF