The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up in the Land of Attachments

Zen koans, beginning some 1500 years ago, refer to stories or questions arising in encounters between monks and old Chinese and Japanese masters, and include commentaries designed to help the Zen practitioner awaken. Koans like Hakuin’s What is the sound of one hand clapping? are well-known, and the word koan has even gone mainstream.

Thousands of classic koans emerged from the lives of monks living inside a Chinese or Japanese culture, and the commentaries on those koans contain poetic elements and images that have proved challenging for many Westerners.

The Book of Householder Koans is a collection of koans created by 21st century Zen practitioners living a lay life in the West. The koans deal with the challenges of relationships, raising children, work, money, love, loss, old age, and death, and come from practitioners across three continents, and with commentaries by two Western teachers.

The collection is based on the premise that our lives as householders contain situations rich with challenge and grit, the equivalents of old Zen masters’ shouts or blows meant to sweep the ground right from under their students. They become koans, or koan practice, when they jolt us out of our usual way of thinking, when we’re no longer observers of our lives but plunge in, closing the gap between ourselves and the situation we face.

Roshi Eve Myonen Marko is the resident teacher at the Green River Zen Center in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and also a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order. She co-founded Peacemaker Circle International with her husband, Bernie Glassman, linking and training spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers in the US, Europe and the Middle East. She has led street retreats, in which participants live on the streets with no money and wearing just the clothes on their backs, and has been a Spiritholder at the Zen Peacemakers’ bearing witness retreats at Auschwitz-Birkenau since 1996, as well as their retreats at Rwanda and the Black Hills with Lakota elders. During the 1980s and the 1990s Eve worked with the Greyston Network of for-profits and not-for-profits working together in Yonkers, New York, and providing housing, child care, jobs, training, and AIDS-related medical services.

Eve authored the YA fantasy, The Dogs of the Kiskadee Hills: Hunt For the Lynx. She was co-editor of Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice (writings of Taizan Maezumi Roshi) and editor of The Dude and the Zen Master. She wrote articles on peacemaking for Shambhala Sun and Tikkun magazines, and appears in the anthology of women Zen teachers The Hidden Lamp. She blogs consistently at www.evemarko.com

Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao is the Abbot Emeritus (1999-2019) of the Zen Center of Los Angeles (ZCLA), having succeeded the late Roshi Bernie Glassman as the third Abbot in 1999. She currently serves as ZCLA’s head teacher and head priest. She ordained as a Zen priest in 1983 and trained with her root teacher, Venerable Taizan Maezumi at ZCLA until his death in 1995. She became a Dharma Successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman in 1996 in Yonkers, NY, and is a founding teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, which promotes spiritually-based social action. Roshi is the co-editor with Roshi Eve Myonen Marko of Appreciate Your Life by Taizan Maezumi (Shambhala 2000), and co-editor with Sensei John Daishin Buksbazen of the newly published editions by Wisdom Publications of On Zen Practice: Body, Breath, and Mind (2002) and The Hazy Moon of Enlightenment (2007).