About
Reigetsu Susan Moon is a lay teacher in the Soto Zen tradition with 35 years of practice experience, affiliated with Everyday Zen Sangha and Upaya Zen Center. Based in Berkeley, California, she is known for work in Buddhist women's history and teachings on aging. She co-edited The Hidden Lamp, a collection of one hundred koans and stories of Buddhist women from the Buddha's time to the present. Her books include The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi, This is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging, and Alive Until You're Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch. She formerly edited Turning Wheel, the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and teaches writing workshops.
Teaching focus
Moon'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. Moon 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. Moon'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
Reigetsu Susan Moon 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 Moon has chosen to share there. Reigetsu Susan Moon has been practicing in the Soto Zen tradition for 35 years, and is a lay teacher with the Everyday Zen Sangha. Her previous books include the cult classic The Life and Letters of Tofu Roshi and This is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging. For many years she edited Turning Wheel, the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She teaches writing workshops, is a serious student of photography, and an enthusiastic grandmother. She lives in Berkeley, CA. She is co-author of The Hidden Lamp, a collection of one hundred koans and stories of Buddhist women from the time of the Buddha to the present day with Zenshin Florence Caplow. This revolutionary book brings together many teaching stories that were hidden for centuries, unknown until this volume. These stories are extraordinary expressions of freedom and fearlessness, relevant for men and women of any time or place. In these pages we meet nuns, laywomen practicing with their families, famous teachers honored by emperors, and old women selling tea on the side of the road. Each story is accompanied by a reflection by a contemporary woman teacher, personal responses that help bring the old stories alive for readers today, and concluded by a final meditation for the reader, a question from the editors meant to spark further rumination and inquiry. These are the voices of the women ancestors of every contemporary Buddhist. Her new book, Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch, is now available from Shambhala. That body of work places Moon 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. Moon'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. Moon contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Moon'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
Moon'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. Moon 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 Moon's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Moon at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Moon'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 Moon is teaching.
