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The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom
“The wisdom of cultures that live harmoniously with nature spoken through the heart and mind of a true gnostic intermediary.” —Ram Dass In this “masterwork of an authentic spirit person,” Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Joan Halifax Roshi delves into “the fruitful darkness”—the shadow side of being, found in the root truths of Native religions, the fecundity of nature, and the stillness of meditation (Thomas Berry). In this highly personal and insightful odyssey of the heart and mind, she encounters Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Mexican shamans, and Native American elders, among others. In rapt prose, she recounts her explorations—from Japanese Zen meditation to hallucinogenic plants, from the Dogon people of Mali to the Mayan rain forest, all the while creating “an adventure of the spirit and a feast of wisdom old and new” Halifax believes that deep ecology (which attempts to fuse environmental awareness with spiritual values) works in tandem with Buddhism and shamanism to discover “the interconnectedness of all life,” and to regain life’s sacredness (Peter Matthiessen).
276 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1993
275 people are currently reading
1746 people want to read
About the author
Joan Halifax
44 books294 followersJoan Halifax is a Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and the author of several books on Buddhism and spirituality. She currently serves as abbot of Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Halifax has received dharma transmission from both Bernard Glassman and Thich Nhat Hanh, and studied under Korean master Seung Sahn. In the 1970s she collaborated on LSD research projects with her ex-husband Stanislav Grof, in addition to other collaborative efforts with Joseph Campbell and Alan Lomax. As a socially engaged Buddhist, Halifax has done extensive work through her Project on Being with Dying. She is on the board of directors of the Mind and Life Institute, a non-profit organization exploring the relationship between science and Buddhism.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
February 27, 2014
I read The Fruitful Darkness when it was first published in 1993. Since then I have opened its pages hundreds of times thinking I will read just one chapter and find myself reading into the early hours of morning. Prose like poetry capturing the mind, spirit and heart, easy to read and yet Joan Halifax's words invite you to think deeply and harvest new awarenesses. Just reading the capture titles take you on a journey: The World Wound, The Way of Silence, The Way of Tradition, The Way of the Mountain, The Way of Language, The Way of Story, The Way of Nonduality, The Way of the Ancestors, The Way of Compassion. As for the title, THE FRUITFUL DARKNESS, the author's words in the preface illuminate its meaning, "What follows are observations, notes, stories, and realizations that point to pathways that link self and other--ways that often take one through the Valley of Darkness. I also suggest that the fruits of understanding and compassion grow in this valley." This book has been a friend, a companion on my life's journey.
October 7, 2018
I discovered this book as a result of reading an interview given by Trevor Hall, a singera-songwriter, who named his most recent album “The Fruitful Darkness” after finding inspiration in this book by Joan Halifax. I, too, have found inspiration in this book and its words.
We need to change our thinking and our approach to existence because our collective, continued existence depend on reaching deep within ourselves to embrace the fruitful darkness and not shun it. We owe it to the past and the future. We in the present have a duty to listen and to learn from our ancestors in the past to prepare a better way for the future of all that exists.
Read this book. Think about this book. Act from this book.
We need to change our thinking and our approach to existence because our collective, continued existence depend on reaching deep within ourselves to embrace the fruitful darkness and not shun it. We owe it to the past and the future. We in the present have a duty to listen and to learn from our ancestors in the past to prepare a better way for the future of all that exists.
Read this book. Think about this book. Act from this book.
March 2, 2021
My first experience with this author and it was a fantastic one. The six months it took to read this book was more about my need to sit with the ideas and read and reread them and let them sink in. I cannot describe this book or even remember enough to offer a good summary but I know I will revisit it often.
September 22, 2021
This will be an important spiritual book I will keep coming back to.
October 4, 2015
A feminine, earthy read. Eminently quotable, this book is a virtual prose poem of a travelog, detailing the author’s experiences with dying cultures and modern buddhism. One of my first readings in deep ecology, I have a hard time sitting with the guilt and pain of the earth as it suffers. The author manages to embrace this suffering as her own and fill her life with meaning, doing her part to keep the old traditions alive. If I had to guess, I would say the author is a seven on the enneagram. Not everyone could live like this, but it makes for a damn good story.
January 26, 2022
Compelling book, its author has lead an interesting life. Largely focused on ecology, practice as means to awaken awareness of ‘interbeing’ — Thich Nhat Hanh’s term (who was also one of her teachers). At times the writing, especially about tribal peoples, leaders and shamans she knows, is hagiographic and a bit sentimental, but mostly it is a clear-sighted invitation to reflection and contemplation.
July 22, 2013
Excellent book, one of my favorites for journeying into the heart and psyche of a deeply spiritual woman.
June 6, 2025
You should read chapter 9 of this book for insane revelations. Definitely gonna come back to this someday because there’s a lot of good stuff in here, it’s just a lot to process and hard to retain ya dig. Spectacular book though sheesh.
August 10, 2025
intuitive and simple truths that nonetheless caused an ontological shift in me. I read this book spread out over a full year, and little by little, it transformed me. even when I wondered if Halifax is portraying the noble savage, I do not think so, for she quotes and quotes, and does not refer to an abstract people, but to persons and their knowledge and messages. Halifax is everything I wanted to be and has opened my horizons to new desires to be connected and do good.
August 5, 2018
A fascinating mix of Joan's personal experience among tribal peoples, with elements of Buddhism that became Ms Halifax's better known existence as a highly regarded Zen Buddhist teacher who has worked extensively with the dying.
Throughout the book, there is great respect for all those she encounters and goes to great lengths to seek out and learn from, enduring various hardships.
This book has certainly driven my interest to pursue more of Joan's work in all fields - they intersect very well with my own interests - Buddhism, tribal wisdom and death and dying.
I was interested and surprised by the variety of influential and interesting people JH was hanging out with and having great adventures with...
This book is also a lovely, unusual shape, which kind of makes it special to read!
Throughout the book, there is great respect for all those she encounters and goes to great lengths to seek out and learn from, enduring various hardships.
This book has certainly driven my interest to pursue more of Joan's work in all fields - they intersect very well with my own interests - Buddhism, tribal wisdom and death and dying.
I was interested and surprised by the variety of influential and interesting people JH was hanging out with and having great adventures with...
This book is also a lovely, unusual shape, which kind of makes it special to read!
January 3, 2019
This is not a book for the faint of heart or the casual reader. This is a complex and sometimes bewildering adventure into tribal wisdom and deep ecology. Like any book that manages to say something profound that I've never heard before, I have great respect for that which I took away and that which I will need to come back to in order to comprehend more fully. I am grateful to Joan Halifax for her extraordinarily adventurous life and her willingness to share it.
July 28, 2025
Coming of age as an atheist, I've easily dismissed books like this. But when I stumbled across the fruitful darkness on goodreads, I felt inside of me that I couldn't dismiss it too. I'm glad. No book, no religion, no sense of spirituality has ever comforted me until now. I will be returning to buddhist literature!
April 29, 2018
Joan Halifax is a good companion with Alan Watts. I want to read more of her books. The best of spirituality.
September 10, 2023
A profound, richly insightful work, written with the kind of poetry and charm that allows for flashes and glimpses of enlightenment – a reality infinitely greater that the particular. I finished the book thinking how difficult it must be to communicate this to readers.
At first, I didn't share the author's romance for the rituals of tribal peoples, lost songs and stories and so on, and I thought the discomforts she endured in pursuit of knowledge verged on the dotty. It's sad when old cultures pass, but that's sometimes inevitable. (Perhaps I'm inured to this. My own culture, which has at its heart the spoken Welsh language, has had a close shave with extinction). I also wondered how she reconciled the passing of these old ways with Buddhist notions of impermanence and acceptance.
It was only when I read the chapter on Nonduality that everything the author been describing started to click. Tribal peoples had ways of living in balance with nature. It provided for them and they looked after it with respect. Nature was an extension of themselves. Today, this should not be not arcane knowledge, but policy. But can anything change?
Almost everyone possesses a sense of self that is discrete from the world around them. It would take a radical epistemological transformation to understand that no one and nothing can exist in isolation. Every atom in a human body is hitched to everything else in the universe. Nature is not some separate entity to occasionally feel guilty about. We are nature. When we harm it we harm ourselves.
This book was written in 1992. A few times the author cites television and the atom bomb as high on the list of ills of modern civilization. Those seem almost quaint now, compared with AI hyper-intelligence and a visibly manifesting climate breakdown.
One thing the author didn't mention: It seems to me that a life lived in balance with nature was easier when the populations of the world were scattered and small. In the year I was born (1966), there were 2 billion people on the planet. By the time I'm atoms again, there will be 9 billion plus, all requiring resources from the Earth. The places of beauty and solitude will become fewer. People will increasingly lose their connection with nature. A new model for living is needed and it probably won't come from any of our current systems. It seems funny how 20th century Marxists thought that class struggle would bring an end to consumer capitalism. None of them imagined that it might be brought to a fiery end by the climate. Tribal peoples could have told them that.
At first, I didn't share the author's romance for the rituals of tribal peoples, lost songs and stories and so on, and I thought the discomforts she endured in pursuit of knowledge verged on the dotty. It's sad when old cultures pass, but that's sometimes inevitable. (Perhaps I'm inured to this. My own culture, which has at its heart the spoken Welsh language, has had a close shave with extinction). I also wondered how she reconciled the passing of these old ways with Buddhist notions of impermanence and acceptance.
It was only when I read the chapter on Nonduality that everything the author been describing started to click. Tribal peoples had ways of living in balance with nature. It provided for them and they looked after it with respect. Nature was an extension of themselves. Today, this should not be not arcane knowledge, but policy. But can anything change?
Almost everyone possesses a sense of self that is discrete from the world around them. It would take a radical epistemological transformation to understand that no one and nothing can exist in isolation. Every atom in a human body is hitched to everything else in the universe. Nature is not some separate entity to occasionally feel guilty about. We are nature. When we harm it we harm ourselves.
This book was written in 1992. A few times the author cites television and the atom bomb as high on the list of ills of modern civilization. Those seem almost quaint now, compared with AI hyper-intelligence and a visibly manifesting climate breakdown.
One thing the author didn't mention: It seems to me that a life lived in balance with nature was easier when the populations of the world were scattered and small. In the year I was born (1966), there were 2 billion people on the planet. By the time I'm atoms again, there will be 9 billion plus, all requiring resources from the Earth. The places of beauty and solitude will become fewer. People will increasingly lose their connection with nature. A new model for living is needed and it probably won't come from any of our current systems. It seems funny how 20th century Marxists thought that class struggle would bring an end to consumer capitalism. None of them imagined that it might be brought to a fiery end by the climate. Tribal peoples could have told them that.
February 8, 2024
I owned this book for 4 years before actually reading it. I had picked it up at least twice a year since acquiring it and read a few chapters. Every time the words slipped through me like wind through the grass. I could feel their power but I couldn’t grasp their true meaning. One day as I sat at the tea table I felt a pull. There was a book in my collection left unread that wanted to work itself into me. My bookshelf laid horizontal behind me, in a room with no chairs, as mine is, it’s easier to grab books when they are stretched across the ground. I pulled out a few books left unread or partially read. “On Earth we’re Breifly Gorgeous” by ocean Voung, “Lord of the Rings” book 2 by JRR Tolkien, “His Hideous Strength” by C.S. Lewis and “The Fruitful Darkness” by Roshi Joan Halifax. This time I chose the book that I had tried so many times before to finish. Turning it in my hands I could feel how alive the pages were and like ripping Velcro I pulled the pages apart and entered the fruitful darkness. Never have I had words speak so directly to my heart. I’m clouded by the tears I shed over these stories I can not tell you if the book will be a good read for anyone but me. What I can say is that this book changed my life. It set me on a trajectory of really
Listening to the world. Seeing everything in creation as my elder siblings. It helped show me that everything in this world is imbued with spirit and contains as much personhood as you or I and they have a story to tell too. The stone people, the deer people, the people of peyote. There are many people in this world that take on shapes that are not made in our image. Their no less people they just have a different experience. We are all so deeply interconnected in this world. If we listen carefully we can learn the stories of all the people we share this earth with. If we listen carefully enough we will know how to share our story. We will know how to utilize our suffering and pain as a means of ripening. We can water the seeds of compassion and love and grow fruit from even the darkest places within us. All can be used for the healing of this world. The world wound. I dare not explain this concept, you must read it yourself. It is too important to be overlooked, on some level we all bare a scar from this world. How will we all address it together in community? How do we carry the weight of suffering and allow it to grow compassion in us? How do we collect fruit from the darkness? These pages like a cairn will mark a path for you where you yourself may find these answers in communion with the world.
Listening to the world. Seeing everything in creation as my elder siblings. It helped show me that everything in this world is imbued with spirit and contains as much personhood as you or I and they have a story to tell too. The stone people, the deer people, the people of peyote. There are many people in this world that take on shapes that are not made in our image. Their no less people they just have a different experience. We are all so deeply interconnected in this world. If we listen carefully we can learn the stories of all the people we share this earth with. If we listen carefully enough we will know how to share our story. We will know how to utilize our suffering and pain as a means of ripening. We can water the seeds of compassion and love and grow fruit from even the darkest places within us. All can be used for the healing of this world. The world wound. I dare not explain this concept, you must read it yourself. It is too important to be overlooked, on some level we all bare a scar from this world. How will we all address it together in community? How do we carry the weight of suffering and allow it to grow compassion in us? How do we collect fruit from the darkness? These pages like a cairn will mark a path for you where you yourself may find these answers in communion with the world.
June 7, 2022
This audio book was almost ruined by the narrator. The content was so relevant to my past experience, and interesting, that I soldiered on.
I'm sure the reader is a nice person, and has a spot in the world of narration, but this content didn't need drama -- just straightforward presentation. Their attempt at an emotional... mellifluous style was distracting and bordered on eye rolling for me.
The book, however, was a very interesting memior and I appreciated it. I feel like I spent my 20's and 30's in her footsteps, so many names of teachers and luminaries were familiar to me. So, I'm biased, but I still think it's a well written and relevant memoir.
I'm sure the reader is a nice person, and has a spot in the world of narration, but this content didn't need drama -- just straightforward presentation. Their attempt at an emotional... mellifluous style was distracting and bordered on eye rolling for me.
The book, however, was a very interesting memior and I appreciated it. I feel like I spent my 20's and 30's in her footsteps, so many names of teachers and luminaries were familiar to me. So, I'm biased, but I still think it's a well written and relevant memoir.
February 12, 2022
I enjoyed Roshi Joan Halifax life stories she shared throughout this book to help the reader understand and integrate nature’s “voice.” “The voices of ancestors, elements and elementals, plants and creatures, the roar of water and ice, the whisper of pine, the swoosh of the hawk, the song of the eagle. The voice of nature can be heard.”
February 13, 2020
This is an incredibly "chewy" book, rich and worth going back to. I listened to the audiobook, which was good, but I didn't really have time to stop and savor it. I'd like to get the print edition so I can dip into it.
April 14, 2023
Joan Halifax shares her broad cultural and spiritual life experience in this part memoir, part anthropological, fully integrated spiritual journey of man and woman and our relationship with the earth.
July 17, 2017
More journal than spiritual discussion
July 12, 2022
Stunning, inimitable knowledge on sacred quests, nature, pilgrimages, and ancenstral ways of being. A few pages in, I cried at the recognition and knowing.
April 11, 2023
May we listen and learn.
May we remember the old ways.
I am all my relations.
May we remember the old ways.
I am all my relations.
January 24, 2024
I really enjoyed parts of this, but I was a bit thrown off by the structure. It might be one that I need to return to.
December 13, 2025
Dense and best read in short stints, but beautiful
November 6, 2013
I heard about this book in the bibliography of another, and almost returned it without reading as I thought this would be another dry academic tome. I am so glad that I decided to give it a try instead. In this book, Joan's wisdom shines through in the same crystalline manner as that of Thich Nhat Han, John Fire Lame Deer, and Annie Dillard. This is a book I will return to again and again as it holds a powerful message of unity and love for all reality. Drawing on Joan Halifax's decades of experience, the writing describes facets of Buddhism and native religions which are insightful for people of all walks of life. She has not written a religious book so much as a poem about existence. Her language is beautiful and effortlessly evokes vivid images and feelings. Here is a literary treasure.
September 10, 2014
Probably the most influential book I've read this year, if not to date. I've turned over Joan Halifax's wisdom since first picking up the book and as I continue to reread favorite passages.
How she weaves together Buddhism, elder culture worldviews, and nature-based traditions is brilliant, provocative, and utterly vital. We do suffer an existential crisis of severe disconnection, and The Fruitful Darkness paves the way for a close listen, communion, and a life lived as one.
A must read for anyone interested in the plight of ourselves and our world.
Notes available via Google docs.
How she weaves together Buddhism, elder culture worldviews, and nature-based traditions is brilliant, provocative, and utterly vital. We do suffer an existential crisis of severe disconnection, and The Fruitful Darkness paves the way for a close listen, communion, and a life lived as one.
A must read for anyone interested in the plight of ourselves and our world.
Notes available via Google docs.
September 5, 2014
This is a semi-autobiography that also explores Buddhist and Shamanic practices. I found it to be an insightful read, with many statements that caused me to pause and ponder them in relationship to my own life and spiritual practice. I especially liker the author's thoughts on stillness and silence, and found them quite useful to consider during a time when I'm in a period of transition. This is a book you'll read again and discover new insights each time.
September 21, 2015
This is my top book of 2015 - Roshi Joan Halifax weaves together meditation and buddhist practice with the wisdom of native and tribal peoples to describe how we might begin to reconnect with our own bodies and the body of the earth. Must read for meditators who are interested in climate change and saving the earth.
January 29, 2008
"Benedicto:May your trails be crooked,
winding,lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing
view.
'''
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest
dreams
waits for you~~~
beyond the next turning of the canyon
walls"
edward abbey
winding,lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing
view.
'''
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than your deepest
dreams
waits for you~~~
beyond the next turning of the canyon
walls"
edward abbey
August 20, 2016
This was an eloquent and heartfelt exploration of the connections between shamanism and Buddhism, told through the author's experience with vision quests, fasting, and exploring the wilderness. Fans of David Abrams would find a lot of similar things to enjoy in this book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews