Uncovering Zen
Through Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, and other Beats, Coyote had first come upon Zen in his teens. Meeting Snyder with the Diggers, Coyote was struck by his 'gravitas and elegance, his care and deliberation.'
Starting in 1975, Coyote developed a meditation practice and finally turned into a committed American Zen Buddhist practitioner, joining the San Francisco Zen Centre. Later on, he was ordained as a Zen Priest in 2015 and a lay priest following the Soto tradition.
Coyote narrated the documentary Inquiry into the Great Matter: A History of Zen Buddhism in addition to doing audiobook recordings of Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Paul Reps's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.
Arts Commission of San Francisco and the California Arts Council Funding from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, a United States federal law passed by Congress, signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1973, Peter Coyote was hired in the early 1970s by the San Francisco Arts Commission in the historical Neighborhood Arts Program in keeping with his dedication to community-based art. First in the nation to employ CETA money to pay artists to serve a city, the San Francisco Arts Commission's Neighborhood Arts/CETA Program From this vantage point, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Coyote to be a member of the California Arts Council, the state agency in charge of setting state art policies. He spent 1975–1983 serving on the CAC. Coyote was chosen chairman by his colleagues three years in a succession following his first year. The arts council budget climbed from $1 million to $16 million while he was chairman; the council's overhead expenses dropped from 50% to 15%, the lowest in the state. Inspired by artists as 'creative problem solvers,' his council developed They avoided the criticism of many conservative legislators by paying artists to 'solve problems for the state' instead of create art. Coyote paid 50 cents on the dollar for relationships with 14 California departments that started to employ artists in a range of roles. The council and the policy were quite successful, which gave Coyote hope to try his hand at mainstream film-acting.
Acting in films and on television
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Coyote started performing once more in plays at San Francisco's award-winning Magic Theatre in 1978. Playing the lead in Sam Shepard's True West, a Hollywood agent approached him; his film career started with Die Laughing. He appeared supportingly in Tell Me a Riddle, Southern Comfort, and as the enigmatic scientist 'Keys' in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. He auditioned for the Indiana Jones part in Raiders of the Lost Ark and was much under consideration. First in a major part was Coyote in the science fiction adventure Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann. He appeared in Outrageous Fortune and Jagged Edge as well. He has made more than 120 films for theaters and television since then, and he has starred under Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodóvar, Martin Ritt, Jean-Paul Rappeneau, Diane Kurys, and Walter Salles among many directors. He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for his 1990 guest performance on the television series Road to Avonlea.
'Coyote's no rubber-stamp leading man,' Leonard Maltin once said, but he seems at ease with that. 'I'm a Zen Buddhist student first, actor second,' Coyote has said. I'll stop acting if I can't make the two lives compatible. I relax off-screen more than on. Apart from his acting in more recent movies including Sphere, A Walk to Remember, and Erin Brockovich, Coyote has also starred in several made-for-television movies and miniseries and performs commercial voice-overs. On a number of television shows, Coyote was cast in lead roles including The 4400 in 2004 and The Inside in 2005. Following the cancellation of The Inside, Coyote returned to The 4400 as a special guest star for their two-part season finale, then joined the cast of ABC's series Commander in Chief as the Vice President of the United States, and the following year did a four-episode turn as Sally Field's dubious boyfriend in Brothers & Sisters.
Story: Narration
Coyote narrated multiple well-known projects in 2005, including the National Geographic-produced PBS documentary based on Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel and the documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. He also related a Lost episode from April 2006. 2008 saw him narrate Torturing Democracy, a PBS documentary on the George W. Bush government's use of 'enhanced interrogation techniques' in the War on Terror. Along with 15 episodes for the National Geographic Explorer series, he narrated the 12-hour Ken Burns series on the National Parks. Using footage from Colorado State Penitentiary, where all of the inmates are housed this way, he narrated the 2010 documentary Solitary Confinement on the impact of long-term isolation. He narrated Burns's The Roosevelts: An Intimate History and starred in the TNT television series Perception as the father of the main character, Dr. Daniel Pierce; the latter saw him win his first Primetime Emmy Award. 2019 saw him narrating Burns' PBS documentary Country Music.
Authoring
In his writings for Mother Jones magazine, some of which he penned as a delegate to the 1996 Democratic National Convention, Coyote's left-wing views are clear; in his conflicts with David Horowitz; and in his autobiography Sleeping Where I Fall. Coyote created 'The Active Opposition' a political television show for Link TV in 2006 and Outside the Box with Peter Coyote beginning on Link TV's special, Special: The End of Oil – Part 2 in 2007.
Published Counterpoint Press in April 1998, Coyote's memoir Sleeping Where I Fall features many of his stories from the 1967 to 1975 counter-culture era. 'Carla's Story,' about a 16-year-old mother who lived communally with Coyote, is one of the tales he included. She became a drug addict, then a prostitute, had her children stolen, and kept spiraling downhill until she turned her life around. Published in Zyzzyva, this narrative received the 1993–1994 Pushcart Prize. He also claims to have been close friend of singer Janis Joplin. Coyote maintains a website with titles for every one of his films and extended samples of most of his work. He is a member of the Red Room.com authors' website.
His memoir The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education was published in April 2015; he 'provides portraits of mentors that shaped him—including his violent, intimidating father, a bass player, a Mafia Consiglieri, and beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduced him to the practice of Zen.'
Four Way Books published a set of Coyote's poems called Tongue of a Crow in September 2021. Comprising five decades, the poems chronicle his life as 'an activist, actor, and Zen Buddhist priest.'
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