About
Rev. Daphna McKnight is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Buddhist Chaplaincy at University of the West. She is an ordained Buddhist minister trained in Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, with seminary training at Upaya Zen Center. McKnight has worked as a hospice, hospital, and university chaplain and has taught mindfulness and compassion practices in business, healthcare, and educational settings. Her teaching focus includes compassion development practices such as tonglen and interfaith chaplaincy training.
Teaching focus
Rev. Daphna'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. Rev. Daphna 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. Rev. Daphna'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
Rev. Daphna McKnight, 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 Rev. Daphna has chosen to share there. Dr. Daphna McKnight is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Buddhist Chaplaincy at University of the West. She attended seminary at Upaya (Cohort 3) and is an ordained Buddhist minister with training in Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Daphna has served for many years as a hospice, hospital, and university Buddhist/interfaith chaplain. She also has extensive experience as an educator, curriculum designer, and trainer in higher education and business environments. Daphna has researched and studied many types of mindfulness and meditative practices, particularly those related to compassion development, such as tonglen. She has taught mindfulness and compassion practices in business, healthcare, and educational settings. Daphna loves engaging with those exploring vocations and avocations in chaplaincy. She also enjoys camping trips with friends and family, meditation retreats, interfaith gatherings, and reading a good book while hanging out in nature. That body of work places Rev. Daphna 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. Rev. Daphna'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. Rev. Daphna contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Rev. Daphna'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
Rev. Daphna'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. Rev. Daphna teaches in the Soto Zen lineage as a priest within that container. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Rev. Daphna's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Rev. Daphna at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms held alongside teaching focused on contemplative care for the dying, grief, and serious illness. Many of these programs draw on Upaya's Being with Dying curriculum and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians. There's room for personal experience and difficult emotion, held inside the container of practice rather than processed away. The schedule is recognizable as Zen: sittings, walking, meals, talks, and time for questions. Quiet is taken seriously. Most participants leave with both a steadier practice and a more honest relationship with mortality.
