Thank You, Mr Stoker! A Small Meditation on the Vampire

Last updated on: May 26, 2018 at 7:48 am By James Ford

Bram Stoker’s gothic novel Dracula was published on this day in 1897. It was a significant cultural marker. Now, vampires had long been part of the cultural matrix. There were even other vampire novels in the nineteenth century before Stoker. But, it is Stoker’s Dracula who brought it into the culture’s livingroom, or possibly more accurately into the culture’s bedroom. An unsigned Wikipedia article on vampires notes how Stoker’s “vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession, with... Read more

A Brief Zen Buddhist Catechism: A First Draft

Last updated on: March 3, 2023 at 8:02 pm By James Ford

I am quite fond of the idea of catechisms, those presentations of a religious tradition’s core teachings through a simple question and answer format. The Christian church invented the idea. In fact the word “catechism” comes from Koine Greek and means “to teach orally.” While in many minds the format is for children, and no doubt that has been a principal use, the catechism is useful for adults as well. All the Reformation churches, including Unitarians,... Read more

A Flash of Lightning in a Summer Cloud: A Zen Reflection on Passingness

Last updated on: May 24, 2018 at 8:21 am By James Ford

The Diamond Sutra is one of the standard texts within the Zen schools. With the stories of the Buddha’s awakening and Bodhidharma’s coming to China the story of Huineng, the “sixth ancestor” completes a trilogy of foundational accounts mixing legend and history and presenting the unique school that is Zen. And significantly, the last of these accounts has Huineng achieve his great insight upon hearing a line from the Diamond Sutra. The Diamond Sutra is one... Read more

Four Essential & Brief Zen Meditation Manuals

Last updated on: July 16, 2023 at 1:08 pm By James Ford

Here are four critical meditation manuals within the Zen tradition. They are arranged in the order they were composed, starting from sometime at the beginning of the twelfth century to the early or middle eighteenth century. We know almost nothing about Zhanglu Zongze the author of the first of these manuals. It is believed to have been written at the beginning of the twelfth century. This text is considered foundational within the Japanese Rinzai school. The second... Read more

Today is Harvey Milk Day

Last updated on: May 22, 2018 at 4:06 pm By James Ford

American politician, San Francisco City Supervisor, and civil rights activist, Harvey Milk was born on this day in 1930. He would have been eighty-eight today, but in 1978 he was assassinated together with Mayor George Moscone. The reasons were complicated, and the precipitating event was because the murderer had resigned his position as a Supervisor and realized Harvey and George had blocked his attempt at returning. But in fact the driving reason at the heart of all the... Read more

Zhanglu Zongze’s Guidelines for Seated Meditation

Last updated on: May 22, 2018 at 6:40 am By James Ford

While researching an article on Zen’s meditation manuals I ran across a few references to the Four Scriptural Texts of the Zen School. While three of those four texts are readily available, the fourth a meditation manual is not. One reference said it was Dogen’s Zazengi. And, I may even have repeated that. But, I quickly realized that as this is a Rinzai text, it was unlikely. So, I wrote to several of my friends who are both Zen... Read more

On Praying for the Dead: Zen and the Mysteries of Dedicating Merit

Last updated on: May 21, 2018 at 10:00 am By James Ford

While I started out my Zen life within the warm embrace of Soto Zen and was ordained unsui and lived in a monastery following the Japanese inheritance for several years, the vast majority of my Zen formation was within a lay lineage that emphasized little beyond regular meditation, frequent retreats and dedication to the practice of koan introspection developed by the Soto master Daiun Sogaku Harada at the beginning of the twentieth century. The discipline was adapted from the... Read more

Behold the Spirit: A Meditation on Alan Watts & His Brief Experiment With a Mystical Christianity

Last updated on: May 20, 2018 at 7:02 am By James Ford

BEHOLD THE SPIRIT A Meditation on Alan Watts & His Brief Experiment with a Mystical Christianity James Ishmael Ford (slightly polished up from a sermon written in 2013) Text It is all too clear that our age suffers from a vast hunger and impoverishment of the spirit which the organized Christian religion, as we know it, rarely satisfies. It would be easy to blame the modern world for ignoring Christianity… if Church religion showed any strong signs... Read more

A Zen Priest Ruminates for a Moment on Psychedelics & Other Special Experiences

Last updated on: May 19, 2018 at 12:04 pm By James Ford

I haven’t read Michael Pollan’s new book on psychedelics, so I cannot comment on it directly. Although I admire him for his earlier books on food. And, I have no doubt he makes a real contribution to our societal considerations of the human mind. That said, me, I’m getting old. And I have found I don’t actually have to read everything people say is important. I don’t even have to read everything that is important. Actually,... Read more

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

Last updated on: May 18, 2018 at 11:03 am By James Ford

There are two Suzukis who stand large at the dawn of Zen breaking forth into North American culture. The first is Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki, best known as D. T. Suzuki, a scholar, translator, and essayist, whose writings both directly and through the popularizations by his sometime disciple Alan Watts, first introduced many of the basic principles of Zen Buddhism to the American public. The other is Shunryu Suzuki, Soto Zen priest and missionary teacher who introduced Zen... Read more