Jishō Warner

Jisho Warner is a Sōtō Zen priest and abiding teacher of Stone Creek Zen Center in Sonoma County, California. Warner is a former president of the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, and its first female and first LGBTQI president. Warner trained for many years both in Japan and the United States. Having graduated from Harvard University in 1965, she became an artist and freelance editor. She has edited books by Robert Thurman, Ed Brown, Wendy Johnson, Jane Hirshfield, and many others. She is a co-editor of the book Opening the Hand of Thought by Kosho Uchiyama, whose teachings she first encountered in the 1980s while practicing at the Pioneer Valley Zendo in Massachusetts under Koshi Ichida.[1] She is a contributor to Receiving the Marrow, a collection of essays on Dogen Zenji.

Jisho Warner

Warner was a longtime student of Dainin Katagiri, under whom she studied at Hokyoji, a residential center in Minnesota.[2] She is a graduate of Aichi Senmon Nisodo in Nagoya, Japan, where she trained under Shundo Aoyama. She also practiced for some years at the Milwaukee Zen Center under Tozen Akiyama, from whom she received shiho, dharma transmission, in 1996.[3]

Warner founded Stone Creek Zen Center in 1996 and has continued to teach there since then. In 2014 two teachers joined her in leading the growing sangha community, Dojin Sarah Emerson and Korin Charlie Pokorny, as part of a highly successful generational succession of temple leadership. Warner has given shiho to three successors: the late Joko Dave Haselwood, who had earlier been a notable publisher of Beat and San Francisco Renaissance poets in the 1960s; Anette Joay Lille, a hospice chaplain; and Toan Irene Flynn, who teaches Zen in St. Augustine, Florida.