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A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis
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.
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.
248 pages, Paperback
Published November 28, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 14, 2025
I hope that the lonely single star above this review hasn't poisoned the well so much that you can't believe that I gave this book a really sincere try. For some context, I read this book as part of a book club with my zen sangha, with whom I've been sitting regularly for several years. I don't consider myself super new to the practice, though I'm newer to studying koans. I also work in energy/environment, so climate change is a subject I care about a lot (though Fire isn't really about climate change specifically so much as it is about 1) how to face any and all crises head-on, and 2) building a relationship with the place where you find yourself). I feel like I should have been the exact target audience for this book, and yet I found it very difficult to connect with the text, even to parse whole paragraphs at the level of mere comprehension, let alone deeper understanding. My opinions are not universal; many of my sangha-mates liked this book a lot, and seemed to get more out of it than I did (though equally many agreed that the writing was very difficult to understand).
The elephant in the room: this review has been incredibly hard to write because I feel that every negative thing I say might reflect on me just as much as the book. I'm sure many of my gut reactions are ego driven defense mechanisms, saying "but surely my beliefs can't be wrong, it must be the book's fault" while I desperately hold onto the "me" at the core of "my" response to climate change. What kind of fool asks for teachings and gets angry when they are given? Am I like the "little bosses" (p. 200) that go to indigenous writer Victor Steffensen for wisdom only to prescribe how he gets to teach? Maybe! How little I "got" this book made me feel quite self-conscious. On the one hand, I'm inclined to charitably say that this book must be intended for more advanced Zen students than I, that I just lacked the dharma eye to "get it." On the other hand, that logic seems to clash with the notion I have encountered so often in Zen that there is no altered state, no enlightenment, no wisdom, no attainment, that what you see is what you get (quite literally, open your eyes and see it in front of you!) So perhaps Fire doesn't really change all that much on a second viewing and there's no better version of it that's worth chasing.
But enough about me! Ultimately, some of my rating is due less to the book's content and my reactions to it than it is to bad writing. Fire is sometimes inscrutable, though I think purposefully so. Murphy is clearing not just writing about koans, but writing in a koanic way, presenting the reader with intentionally provocative (at times, nonsensical!) ideas as a way to shock them out of what zen sometimes calls "habit mind". Murphy, to quote my zen teacher, is "writing from the place of oneness", which is maybe admirable and also maybe makes her sound a little unmoored from reality. But when I say "bad writing" I'm (mostly) not talking about that style of provocative metaphor. I'm talking about the insanely long sentences. By way of an example, here's one representative 50-word behemoth I found: "With the steady 'moon of mind' clarifying itself by all that flows through the senses as the 'flower of eyes,' Earth’s crisis can be approached as a strangely privileged moment to be sharply alive, on call, awake to the Earth, prepared to meet what is unfolding as inseparable from ourselves". So much of the text is just like this. I found one sentence that was, no joke, 86-words long, which I dare not repeat here. Worse still are clauses like "this knowing knows us earlier than we know ourselves."
Fire is a strange mix of being deeply pessimistic about the prognosis of climate change (you can tell Murphy has been influenced by the at-times doomerist rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion, she says as much in the book's introduction) and also sometimes casually carefree? I might paraphrase this tension as "Sure we're all going to die, but isn't this tree so beautiful?" But, in that intentionally provocative way I described above, Murphy doesn't stop at letting Earth be more beautiful than crisis is scary, she has to turn everything else topsy turvy. The tiger's fangs in your throat are "kindness" (p. 50); precariousness is not actually precariousness, it is a "prayer for help" (p. 55); crisis is not crisis, but rather an "invitation to venture beyond the self." What do we say to times of difficulty? "Welcome," says Murphy.
This may be a pill too tough to swallow. I can't shake my instinctive "why would I want to welcome a crisis?" reaction. These reinterpreations of a word to mean something orthogonal to how it is conventionally understood calls to mind what video essayist Dan Olsen refers to as a "private definition" in his work on cults, in a way that makes me wary (more on this later in the review). Zen often emphasizes a relationship between suffering and wisdom, like the alchemical processing of lead into gold. This metaphor resonates with me a lot, and I do think that there are things that climate change can teach us about ourselves. But to put an upside on climate change feels, borderline offensive to me (there's that ego again). Would we ever say "here's the silver lining to genocide," or "maybe tuberculosis is actually an opportunity to be open and playful" (the latter is a thing that Murphy literally says about the climate crisis). In the original and substantially more scathing version of this review that I decided to revise, I began by referencing the classic Dril tweet "the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres [sic] actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you [expletive] moron." Honestly, a lot of this book felt like Murphy was saying essentially exactly that, that she had so thoroughly maxed her equanimity that bad things seemed good and good things seemed bad. To cleanse the palate from that Dril tweet, it also calls to mind this line from one of history's greatest chess players, Mikhail Tal: "You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one." I feel like Murphy got me lost in that forest.
If my back-to-back allusions to infamous posters and chess masters feel out of place, get ready, because Murphy loves some out-of-nowhere literary allusions. Of course, the whole of the Buddhist canon is fair game in a book about zen, but also quoted are Dante's Divine Comedy, Moby Dick (though she actually misattributes a quote to Melville which instead came from a book of poems), Thomas Aquinas, Greek mythology... Winnie the Pooh (yes, really!) This syncretism also carries a whiff of cultishness to me, reminding me of the cherry-picking of convenient factoids while ignoring the context of those source materials. Thomas Aquinas might have said something kind of zen-sounding once, but I don't know that he's an appropriate source of wisdom in a book about indigenous earth-tending.
It unfortunately gets worse. The text is permeated with a sort of magical thinking, where mundane things are imbued with significance. It becomes highly meaningful, not a coincidental quirk of English that "belonging" contains the word "longing" (nevermind that in the Dogen quote that inspired this observation "Mountains belong to those who love them," he wasn't speaking English, and surely the etymology of whatever Japanese word that's being translated to "belonging" is completely different...) Actually, Murphy does this a lot with words, there's sort of a fixation on etymology that pervades the text. Did you know that "happen" and "happy" share the Germanic root "happ" meaning "luck"? That's important, for some reason. Much ado is made over the fact that the Japanese character for fire kind of looks like a human hand with its fingers splayed if you squint. But I digress, back to magical thinking. She presents a story in which she connects with the Earth just before fleeing her temple during the Australian bushfires of 2019, only to return to find it unharmed, and she presents these without explicitly linking them, but in such a way that leads me to ask "is Susan Murphy suggesting that her prayer influenced the fire, that a miracle has occurred?" I love her instruction (pp. 202-203) to sit down on the ground and feel connected with the Earth, to speak to it, even. it reminds me of moments of wonderful connection I often feel in nature. But then she writes about the Earth answering, feeling the reply "your suffering with me is my care for you" as a buzzing in her hands, and it smacks to me of astrology, of hearing what you want to hear. Like. I don't know that our Mother the Earth said that, I think you just believe it to be true and are looking for new ways to confirm your beliefs. I tire of this.
The text's best moments come in the stories Murphy tells, often pulling examples from her own life. Some of these, like the motorcyclist (Chapter 5) were wonderful! Others, like the train incident (Chapter 5) and the fire demonstration (Chapter 7) carry an "and then everybody clapped" quality, that lead me to question their veracity. Maybe whether they literally happened doesn't matter. Of course, when I read classic koans, I don't have any instinct to fact check them (Mumonkan Case 5: "um, actually, your teeth aren't strong enough to be able to hold onto a branch over that cliff"), so maybe it's on me that I let my hackles get raised by Murphy's koanic retellings.
So, how to wrap this up? I fully recognize that the world didn't really need another to do list. We aren't lacking messengers to tell us to eat less meat and take public transit, and a book that focused on that we be neither especially unique nor very Zen. Susan Murphy isn't interested in re-inventing the wheel, and I'd say that she succeeds at not being trite. But instead of something as useful as advice, here's what we get (Chapter 2): "Can something be done with less doing, using the calm inside the moments that can be created within an emergency when what is happening is met with not-knowing?" But while this might be great advice for zen practice, I am not convinced that it makes for effective climate action. I'm not sold on the premise that what heals my heart also, necessarily, simultaneously, heals the Earth, and vice versa. It's a beautiful thought. I think there are ways in which it is true! But, to lean into my hater instinct, it lacks any rigor whatsoever. Can something be done with less doing? I respond: "Literally no!" Doing less means doing less! I get that compared to the austere beauty of shikantaza, we are constantly running around our vapid little hamster wheels. But compared to meaningful climate action, we're doing next to nothing, and to espouse doing even less is somewhat infuriating. Sorry, Roshi. I kinda wish I had a different reaction, too.
The elephant in the room: this review has been incredibly hard to write because I feel that every negative thing I say might reflect on me just as much as the book. I'm sure many of my gut reactions are ego driven defense mechanisms, saying "but surely my beliefs can't be wrong, it must be the book's fault" while I desperately hold onto the "me" at the core of "my" response to climate change. What kind of fool asks for teachings and gets angry when they are given? Am I like the "little bosses" (p. 200) that go to indigenous writer Victor Steffensen for wisdom only to prescribe how he gets to teach? Maybe! How little I "got" this book made me feel quite self-conscious. On the one hand, I'm inclined to charitably say that this book must be intended for more advanced Zen students than I, that I just lacked the dharma eye to "get it." On the other hand, that logic seems to clash with the notion I have encountered so often in Zen that there is no altered state, no enlightenment, no wisdom, no attainment, that what you see is what you get (quite literally, open your eyes and see it in front of you!) So perhaps Fire doesn't really change all that much on a second viewing and there's no better version of it that's worth chasing.
But enough about me! Ultimately, some of my rating is due less to the book's content and my reactions to it than it is to bad writing. Fire is sometimes inscrutable, though I think purposefully so. Murphy is clearing not just writing about koans, but writing in a koanic way, presenting the reader with intentionally provocative (at times, nonsensical!) ideas as a way to shock them out of what zen sometimes calls "habit mind". Murphy, to quote my zen teacher, is "writing from the place of oneness", which is maybe admirable and also maybe makes her sound a little unmoored from reality. But when I say "bad writing" I'm (mostly) not talking about that style of provocative metaphor. I'm talking about the insanely long sentences. By way of an example, here's one representative 50-word behemoth I found: "With the steady 'moon of mind' clarifying itself by all that flows through the senses as the 'flower of eyes,' Earth’s crisis can be approached as a strangely privileged moment to be sharply alive, on call, awake to the Earth, prepared to meet what is unfolding as inseparable from ourselves". So much of the text is just like this. I found one sentence that was, no joke, 86-words long, which I dare not repeat here. Worse still are clauses like "this knowing knows us earlier than we know ourselves."
Fire is a strange mix of being deeply pessimistic about the prognosis of climate change (you can tell Murphy has been influenced by the at-times doomerist rhetoric of Extinction Rebellion, she says as much in the book's introduction) and also sometimes casually carefree? I might paraphrase this tension as "Sure we're all going to die, but isn't this tree so beautiful?" But, in that intentionally provocative way I described above, Murphy doesn't stop at letting Earth be more beautiful than crisis is scary, she has to turn everything else topsy turvy. The tiger's fangs in your throat are "kindness" (p. 50); precariousness is not actually precariousness, it is a "prayer for help" (p. 55); crisis is not crisis, but rather an "invitation to venture beyond the self." What do we say to times of difficulty? "Welcome," says Murphy.
This may be a pill too tough to swallow. I can't shake my instinctive "why would I want to welcome a crisis?" reaction. These reinterpreations of a word to mean something orthogonal to how it is conventionally understood calls to mind what video essayist Dan Olsen refers to as a "private definition" in his work on cults, in a way that makes me wary (more on this later in the review). Zen often emphasizes a relationship between suffering and wisdom, like the alchemical processing of lead into gold. This metaphor resonates with me a lot, and I do think that there are things that climate change can teach us about ourselves. But to put an upside on climate change feels, borderline offensive to me (there's that ego again). Would we ever say "here's the silver lining to genocide," or "maybe tuberculosis is actually an opportunity to be open and playful" (the latter is a thing that Murphy literally says about the climate crisis). In the original and substantially more scathing version of this review that I decided to revise, I began by referencing the classic Dril tweet "the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "theres [sic] actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you [expletive] moron." Honestly, a lot of this book felt like Murphy was saying essentially exactly that, that she had so thoroughly maxed her equanimity that bad things seemed good and good things seemed bad. To cleanse the palate from that Dril tweet, it also calls to mind this line from one of history's greatest chess players, Mikhail Tal: "You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one." I feel like Murphy got me lost in that forest.
If my back-to-back allusions to infamous posters and chess masters feel out of place, get ready, because Murphy loves some out-of-nowhere literary allusions. Of course, the whole of the Buddhist canon is fair game in a book about zen, but also quoted are Dante's Divine Comedy, Moby Dick (though she actually misattributes a quote to Melville which instead came from a book of poems), Thomas Aquinas, Greek mythology... Winnie the Pooh (yes, really!) This syncretism also carries a whiff of cultishness to me, reminding me of the cherry-picking of convenient factoids while ignoring the context of those source materials. Thomas Aquinas might have said something kind of zen-sounding once, but I don't know that he's an appropriate source of wisdom in a book about indigenous earth-tending.
It unfortunately gets worse. The text is permeated with a sort of magical thinking, where mundane things are imbued with significance. It becomes highly meaningful, not a coincidental quirk of English that "belonging" contains the word "longing" (nevermind that in the Dogen quote that inspired this observation "Mountains belong to those who love them," he wasn't speaking English, and surely the etymology of whatever Japanese word that's being translated to "belonging" is completely different...) Actually, Murphy does this a lot with words, there's sort of a fixation on etymology that pervades the text. Did you know that "happen" and "happy" share the Germanic root "happ" meaning "luck"? That's important, for some reason. Much ado is made over the fact that the Japanese character for fire kind of looks like a human hand with its fingers splayed if you squint. But I digress, back to magical thinking. She presents a story in which she connects with the Earth just before fleeing her temple during the Australian bushfires of 2019, only to return to find it unharmed, and she presents these without explicitly linking them, but in such a way that leads me to ask "is Susan Murphy suggesting that her prayer influenced the fire, that a miracle has occurred?" I love her instruction (pp. 202-203) to sit down on the ground and feel connected with the Earth, to speak to it, even. it reminds me of moments of wonderful connection I often feel in nature. But then she writes about the Earth answering, feeling the reply "your suffering with me is my care for you" as a buzzing in her hands, and it smacks to me of astrology, of hearing what you want to hear. Like. I don't know that our Mother the Earth said that, I think you just believe it to be true and are looking for new ways to confirm your beliefs. I tire of this.
The text's best moments come in the stories Murphy tells, often pulling examples from her own life. Some of these, like the motorcyclist (Chapter 5) were wonderful! Others, like the train incident (Chapter 5) and the fire demonstration (Chapter 7) carry an "and then everybody clapped" quality, that lead me to question their veracity. Maybe whether they literally happened doesn't matter. Of course, when I read classic koans, I don't have any instinct to fact check them (Mumonkan Case 5: "um, actually, your teeth aren't strong enough to be able to hold onto a branch over that cliff"), so maybe it's on me that I let my hackles get raised by Murphy's koanic retellings.
So, how to wrap this up? I fully recognize that the world didn't really need another to do list. We aren't lacking messengers to tell us to eat less meat and take public transit, and a book that focused on that we be neither especially unique nor very Zen. Susan Murphy isn't interested in re-inventing the wheel, and I'd say that she succeeds at not being trite. But instead of something as useful as advice, here's what we get (Chapter 2): "Can something be done with less doing, using the calm inside the moments that can be created within an emergency when what is happening is met with not-knowing?" But while this might be great advice for zen practice, I am not convinced that it makes for effective climate action. I'm not sold on the premise that what heals my heart also, necessarily, simultaneously, heals the Earth, and vice versa. It's a beautiful thought. I think there are ways in which it is true! But, to lean into my hater instinct, it lacks any rigor whatsoever. Can something be done with less doing? I respond: "Literally no!" Doing less means doing less! I get that compared to the austere beauty of shikantaza, we are constantly running around our vapid little hamster wheels. But compared to meaningful climate action, we're doing next to nothing, and to espouse doing even less is somewhat infuriating. Sorry, Roshi. I kinda wish I had a different reaction, too.
April 13, 2025
Probably 2.5/5 for me, but rounding up because it did have some genuinely good tidbits in it.
I did find the overall experience of reading this book primarily frustrating. Even as a Zen practitioner of ~2 years, I found it not to be a very accessible text. It was written in a very koan-like and poetic way, which is impactful in small doses and not in book format. I also found the main messages of this book (that it is important and good to be engaged and present) to be repetitiously stated over and over again. It made, again, for a frustrating reading experience. There were also some small errors/typos that made it through the book--the primary one sticking out to me being a misquote of Moby Dick on page 72. As a stan of Moby Dick, I found that particularly offensive (lol).
Despite all my gripes, I enjoyed reading it in book club format with my Zen community. We had great discussions about it, and there were parts of this book that did resonate with me a lot. It is a book I might refer back to in the future.
But, yeah, I do wish this book had a better editor.
I did find the overall experience of reading this book primarily frustrating. Even as a Zen practitioner of ~2 years, I found it not to be a very accessible text. It was written in a very koan-like and poetic way, which is impactful in small doses and not in book format. I also found the main messages of this book (that it is important and good to be engaged and present) to be repetitiously stated over and over again. It made, again, for a frustrating reading experience. There were also some small errors/typos that made it through the book--the primary one sticking out to me being a misquote of Moby Dick on page 72. As a stan of Moby Dick, I found that particularly offensive (lol).
Despite all my gripes, I enjoyed reading it in book club format with my Zen community. We had great discussions about it, and there were parts of this book that did resonate with me a lot. It is a book I might refer back to in the future.
But, yeah, I do wish this book had a better editor.
August 25, 2025
What a beautiful book! Steeped in Zen Buddhism, and also, by the end, in Country, an Australian indigenous concept, this volume helps the reader concerned about the Climate Crisis avoid despair and remain willing to act. Every Part, Chapter, Section and Page was profound. So much so that I had to read it slowly, a bit at a time, over days and weeks, to make sure I took it in. We are all here together in our human habitat on this planet. So far we have been sustained by the more-than-human world around us, but that is now in question. And we don't know what the answers will be. We must just face that, turn toward each other and act together in the myriads of ways we know are necessary to address the vast ecological emergency we find ourselves in. This book will help you find the determination to do that. What could be more worthwhile?
December 2, 2025
At a time when the climate crisis feels overwhelming, Susan Murphy offers a guide that is both contemplative and empowering. Through Zen koans encounter stories from East Asia’s radical Buddhist tradition Murphy invites readers to confront uncertainty, fear, and grief, transforming them into regenerative openness and possibility.
This book goes beyond traditional self-help or environmental commentary. It weaves together mindfulness, spiritual inquiry, and indigenous wisdom, particularly drawing on the Australian Aboriginal concept of Country, to reveal the interconnectedness of all life. Each koan encourages reflection, humility, and a deeper understanding of our relationship with the Earth. For readers seeking spiritual depth and actionable insight into living responsibly in a climate-challenged world, this is a rare and resonant work.
January 6, 2024
Didn't do much for me. I guess you have to be really into it. Koan based Zen, not the climate crisis. We're all really in that.
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