ZEN MESTEREK ZEN MASTERS
« Zen főoldal
« vissza a Terebess Online nyitólapjára

Joan Jiko Halifax (1942-)

Dharma name: 慈光 Jikō

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Halifax

Joan Halifax
has followed a path over the last four decades that epitomizes the questing
spirit of her generation. She was born in 1942 and raised a Christian. She
went to college in New Orleans in the 1960s and became involved in the civil
rights movement, then moved to New York where she worked with Alan
Lomax, an anthropologist at Columbia University. Several years later, she
traveled to Tibet and then Africa, eventually studying the African Dogon
people. Upon her return, she married Stanislav Grof, a Czech psychiatrist,
with whom she explored the use of LSD in therapy for people facing terminal
cancer, eventually earning a Ph.D. in medical anthropology. After her
marriage with Grof ended, Halifax worked with Joseph Campbell, the popular
interpreter of mythology. She then began to study shamanism as practiced
by the Huichol Indians in Mexico, while settling in southern California
and co-founding the Ojai Foundation, an organization devoted to alternative
forms of community and spirituality.

Halifax developed an early interest in Buddhism from reading the works
of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, but she formally took refuge only after
being introduced to Seung Sahn, the head of the Kwan Um school of Zen.
After studying with him for ten years, she received ordination in 1976. In the
mid-1980s, she met Thich Nhat Hanh at Plum Village in southern France;
she studied with him and was ordained as a teacher in the Tiep Hien order
in 1990. In that year she founded the Upaya, a Buddhist center in Santa Fe,
where she continues to teach today. Since 1994, Upaya has provided spiritual
counseling to the terminally ill; by the end of the 1990s, Halifax was best
known in the Buddhist community for her work on death and dying.

Halifax recently became interested in the kind of socially engaged Buddhism
taught by Bernard Glassman, founder of the Zen Community of
New York. In the late 1990s, when Glassman and his wife, Sandra Jishu
Holmes, began the Zen Peacemaker Order, Halifax joined them as a Founding
Teacher. She is now a priest and teacher in the Soto Zen tradition.
Upaya was renamed the Upaya Peace Institute and is now one of the teaching
paths in the Zen Peacemaker Order.

Halifax is the author of a number of books, including The Human Encounter
With Death, which she wrote with Grof; Shamanic Voices: A Survey of
Visionary Narratives; Shaman: The Wounded Healer; and The Fruitful Darkness:
Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth.

Richard Hughes Seager - Buddhism in America, Columbia Contemporary American Religion Series, 2000. pp. 253-253.

PDF: Joan Halifax, Standing at the edge: finding freedom where fear and courage meet. 2018.

PDF: Joan Halifax, Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death. 2008.

PDF: Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness: Reconnecting With the Body of the Earth. 1993

PDF: Stanislav Grof, Joan Halifax, The Human Encounter with Death. 1978