Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans

by Joan Sutherland

Nautilus Book Award Winner

An intimate spiritual and literary journey exploring how Zen koans make us permeable to the joys and the anguish of this life—and to the primordial mystery we glimpse behind the veil of the everyday.

In Through Forests of Every Color, renowned Zen teacher Joan Sutherland reimagines the koan tradition with allegiance to the root spirit of the koans and to their profound potential for vivifying, subverting, and sanctifying our lives. Her decades of practicing with koans and of translating them from classical Chinese imbues this text with a warm familiarity, an ease still suffused with awe.  
 
Interlinked essays on “koans as art,” “keeping company with koans,” and “walking the koan way” intersperse with beautifully translated renditions of dozens of traditional Zen koans. Sutherland also shares innovative koans culled from Western literature, as well as teachings on how to create idiosyncratic koans or "turning words" from the circumstances of one's own life.
 
“First honored is your yearning, the preparation made on faith that there is something that will receive you if you make yourself ready,” writes Sutherland of the koan seeker. “Bathed—attended to, washed free of complications—and then aspiring to the deepest kind of beauty—receptive, brave, dedicated, openhearted. Already you’ve begun to look like the thing you’re looking for.”

Genres: Zen, Buddhism, Nonfiction

207 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2022

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply informational, and personally provocative of opportunities for growth. Pleased to have been given it, to have read it, and to keep referring back for a time.

[Terrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a koan salon where we slowly worked our way through it and discussed. Great book, and the discussions were expanding.

[John Fredrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book - challenging while at the same time approachable. I strongly suspect that subsequent re-reads will offer greater insights.

[N Saxena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book I will read again and again. Each time I have no doubt that something different (and the same) will catch my eye, resonate on a cellular level. Filled with brilliance, insights and thought-provoking prose, poetry and koans.

As only one example of what I mean from the chapter “Falls Into A Well” - “Eventually the idea of falling took on vaster proportions. Lifetime after lifetime, we fall through the universe, through solar systems and interstellar gas clouds. Now we’re falling together through a little planet in one of those solar systems. We find that it’s made of carbon and hydrogen, tenderness and regret, light and dark, and twilight. It may not be like this everywhere; life as a molecule in one of those interstellar gas clouds might be ecstatic, surfing the currents of space.” (p. 163)

I could continue on. The book is filled with awe-inspiring passages that deserve to be savoured, sat with, dreamt about.