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 LGBTQ president. 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, Dainin Katagiri, 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. She has contributed to a number of books, including "Receiving the Marrow (a collection of essays on Dogen Zenji)", "Nothing is Hidden, The Hidden Lamp, Being Bodies, The Beginner’s Guide to Zen Buddhism," and "365 Zen." Warner trained in both the United States and in Japan. She was a longtime student of Dainin Katagiri, who was by then the head of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, and trained under him at Hokyoji, a residential center in Minnesota. She practiced at Aichi Senmon Nisodo, a monastery in Nagoya, Japan, where she studied  under Shundō Aoyama Rōshi. She trained finally under Tozen Akiyama at the Milwaukee Zen Center, was ordained by him, and received shiho, dharma transmission, from him in 1995. 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 dharma transmission to four successors: the late Joko Dave Haselwood, who had earlier been a notable publisher of Beat and San Francisco Renaissance  poets in the 1960s; Annette Joay Lille, a hospice chaplain; Toan Irene Flynn, who teaches Zen in St. Augustine, Florida; and Myozen Barton Stone, who teaches at Stone Creek.