Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Transcendentalism & the Way of Wisdom in the West a talk by James Ishmael Ford Thanks to the good folk at St Sarah the Egyptian for recording this talk. Read more

A couple of things followed my previous posting, a small and very much preliminary reflection on the one and the empty in Zen realization. One turned on my allusion to an article by Victor Sogen Hori, “Teaching and Learning in the Rinzai Zen Monastery.” I’d not in fact read the article, but rather found a very useful pull quote from an essay in Wikipedia. Hori is magnificent, a first rate scholar as well as a long time Zen practitioner, Rinzai... Read more

THE ONE, THE MANY AND THE GREAT EMPTY Zen, Koans, Awakening & the Course of our Lives Some Notes James Ishmael Ford I was talking with a friend about spiritual direction in Zen Buddhism, particularly among those of us who walk the way of koan introspection. Somehow the subject turned toward initial awakening experiences, enlightenment experiences, sometimes called kensho in Japanese and jian xing in Chinese, standing for the realization of our fundamental nonduality. I asserted my view that pretty... Read more

 Read more

On this day in 1893 a series of events began that turned Mohandas Gandhi’s life in a new direction. And with that opened a world of possibility for all of us… Here’s a lovely capturing of those events… Read more

Writing for the Washington Post, reporter Becky Krystal tells us: “Ray Bradbury, a boundlessly imaginative novelist who wrote some of the most popular science fiction books of all time, including “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles,” and who transformed the genre of flying saucers and little green men into a medium exploring childhood terrors, colonialism and the erosion of individual thought, died June 5. He was 91.” Ms Krystal’s story continues here. Ray Bradbury was one of the fixtures of... Read more

 Read more

A SONG OF ABELARD A Meditation on Knowing and Not Knowing James Ishmael Ford 3 June 2012 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island Text Lord God of truth and love, who called Peter Abelard to your service, and endowed him with many excellent gifts: grant that we may seek diligently for the truth in our several callings, and may learn to love the truth more than our own cleverness. When we are wrong, grant that we may accept correction from... Read more

I was looking for something else when I stumbled upon a list of monks. And lo and behold, there I was, number fifty-eight… This has to do with my Zen life. The normative ordination model for Buddhists throughout the world is vinaya monasticism. However, through a complex series of events over a long period of time, Buddhist ordination in Japan moved from a traditional monastic model to what I think is better described as priestly or ministerial. But. And it... Read more

Doc Watson has died. A loss to us all… Read more