About
Paula Arai holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University and is the Eshinni & Kakushinni Chair of Women and Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. She is affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. Arai has written several books including Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra and The Little Book of Zen Healing: Japanese Rituals for Beauty, Harmony, and Love. Her research employs ethnographic methods and focuses on healing rituals within Buddhism, particularly women's roles in Buddhist practice. She conducts public speaking and leads workshops on healing rituals.
Teaching focus
Arai's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Arai teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Arai's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Paula Arai, Ph.D. appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Arai has chosen to share there. Paula Arai (Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies, Harvard University) is author of a number of books, including Painting Enlightenment: Healing Visions of the Heart Sutra -- The Buddhist Art of Iwasaki Tsuneo and The Little Book of Zen Healing: Japanese Rituals for Beauty, Harmony, and Love. Her current project is Of Lotuses and Mud: Women Liberating Buddhism. Steeped in ethnographic research, she takes an embodied approach to her work and finds poetic immersive storytelling a potent medium for conveying the experiences of transformative healing she researches. An active public speaker, Arai also leads workshops on healing rituals. She holds the Eshinni & Kakushinni Chair of Women and Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley. Website: Zenhealing.org That body of work places Arai inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Arai's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Arai contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Arai's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Arai's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Arai contributes as part of Upaya's wider faculty rather than as a Zen priest. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Arai's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Arai at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Arai's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Arai is teaching.
