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The Case: “Delusion is Enlightenment; enlightenment is delusion.” Shortly after starting Zen practice, I got a free ride, one of those spontaneous instants where space and time don’t apply. My assigned meditation technique4 at the time was counting breaths, and somewhere between six and seven, things landed in the numberless absolute. Everything known was wiped out in a swoop, yet nothing was lacking, nothing was anything, everything was utterly ordinary. The lesson was that perceptions can be overturned instantly. In... Read more

A couple of years ago Jan and I went to the Cambridge Cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of the James brothers, she with a small bouquet for Henry and me with a rose for William. After we lay our flowers on the graves and offered up our thanks for their contributions to world culture we turned around to walk back to our car. That’s when I noticed the headstone just across the way that had a large flaming... Read more

I have enormous reservations about how best to encounter contemporary China considering their continuous repression of religions that don’t fit neatly under government control as much as for their jackbooted occupation of Tibet. And, China is the spiritual home for all of us who walk the Zen way. Zen emerged out of the encounter between Indian Buddhists and indigenous Chinese culture and religion, particularly with followers of Taoism. So much about Zen is obviously about Chinese sensibilities and approaches to... Read more

LIKE AN EARTHQUAKE Facing Death and Embracing Life A Sermon byJames Ishmael Ford Delivered at a Workshop on Death and Dyingat theFirst Unitarian Society in Newton 10 November 2007 Text I am not ready to die, But I am learning to trust death As I have trusted life. I am moving Toward a new freedom Born of detachment, And a sweet grace – Learning to let go. I am not ready to die, But as I approach sixty I turn... Read more

Arthur Neville Chamberlain, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, disgraced for his policy of appeasement in dealing with Hitler, died on this day in 1940. What is more immediately of interest to me is that Chamberlain was a Unitarian. At least he was raised a Unitarian and while he never joined a church in his adulthood (and was in fact buried from Westminster Abbey), was generally seen by his friends and his enemies throughout his adulthood as a Unitarian. It... Read more

A long time and much beloved member of the Unitarian Universalist congregation I currently serve who has since moved out to California recently learned she has cancer and, it appears, not a long time to live. Being a good UU she asked me for a reading list. I solicited colleagues on both UU and Zen Buddhist listservs to which I belong for their suggestions. I gleaned the following from their responses. Pema Chodron When Things Fall Apart (for me perhaps... Read more

ABC News has a delightful if apparently occasionally disconcerting questionnaire that reveals your “true” choices among the current crop of presidential hopefuls. (I gather more than one self-professed Democrat found a Republican or two on their list, as well as significant examples of the other way ’round…) While I never strayed from the Democratic fold in this test, I wasn’t entirely happy with the list that popped for me. The first time I took it I ended up with Gravel... Read more

This past Sunday I had the enormous pleasure of leading a small workshop on koan practice with particular emphasis on the Mu or No koan at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. In preparation for this workshop I cooked up a brief reading list. As it turns out there really isn’t much written on koan Zen that is directly useful to practitioners. Sadly the field is dominated either by spiritual tourists who for the most part have no idea of... Read more

Isolato by Larissa Szporluk The ox is slow but the earth is patient. The ox is in a war of many tiers but no engagement, like folds within a bellows that broke from the accordion (war to be alone in a shiftless wind that does not answer, war to be the only child in existence, even frozen, be the only sound that plows the only land, and as the only one, be dumb to all remembrance of how small or... Read more