Sensei James Ishmael Ford, Guiding Teacher ~ info@zcboston.net

An Interdependent Web:
An Interview with James Ishmael Ford

(Slightly edited from CrossCurrents Volume 52, Number 1, Spring 2002)

James Ishmael Ford is the Senior Minister at First Unitarian Society of Newton (Massachusetts). He is also the resident teacher (sensei) for the Henry David Thoreau Zen Sangha and Spring Hill Zen (Somerville, Massachusetts), which together form the Zen Community of Boston. I interviewed him during a visit to a potential location for extended retreats for the community: a Swedenborgian center located on Cape Cod Bay in Duxbury, Massachusetts. We talked as we drove and during lunch. The combination of religious traditions—Episcopalian interviewer of Buddhist Unitarian on a visit to a Swedenborgian retreat center—was quintessential CrossCurrents. Add to that mix the fact that the interviewer is also one of Ford’s Zen students and the possibilities for subtext increase geometrically. [Kenneth Arnold]

CC: Can we start with a little background on your own beginnings in terms of your spiritual tradition?

FORD: I was born in Oakland, California, in 1948 and raised in a family that was essentially fundamentalist Baptist. The center of our family was my maternal grandmother, Bolene Bernard. She was a spirit-filled woman who guided us toward whatever churches we would attend and determined how long we would stay in them. She was deeply important in my life.

I think probably the first thing that I got from her as a perspective on spirituality came from the absolute rift between Protestants and Catholics in our church. I recall seeing a film at church one Sunday afternoon that showed how Catholics of course were not Christians and there was inevitably going to be a conflict with them. There was also some connection the film explored between Catholicism and Communism and, I’m sure, international banking.

But Grandmother said this wasn’t true, that Catholics were Christians. This was a wedge for me in my own spiritual quest, showing I did not have to be completely constrained by my rather deeply defined faith of origin. It was okay to think independently. And I did. When I was 16 I began to have serious doubts and by the time I was 17 I decided I was an atheist.

CC: That went quickly.

FORD: Yeah, it was quick. But it was not that unusual for my family. Men didn’t attend church. Women and children were religious and the men were drunks.

CC: So you jettisoned not only fundamentalist Baptist but Christianity as a whole.

FORD: Right. Although I find it interesting that I chose atheism instead of agnosticism. Agnosticism probably being the only really reasonable response to the information we have accessible to us.

CC: In fact, you not only rejected Christianity but all theistic traditions.

FORD: I think what I did was make an impassioned assertion from which to begin my spiritual quest. Not long after I was reading the British expatriate crowd, particularly Aldous Huxley. I loved his novels of manners and read most of them. And through him I discovered Gerald Heard and Christopher Isherwood. Through them I discovered Vedanta and Ramakrishna and that kind of high-end nineteenth and twentieth century Hinduism.

CC: Did you follow that in some way?

FORD: Mostly I read in it. I was raised in the Bay Area where there was a Vedanta Society center in Berkeley and I attended worship services there once. The swami was extraordinarily boring and the service was only slightly different from protestant form. They even had pews, which was something I wasn’t ready for at the time. I fairly quickly lost interest in practical pursuit of Vedanta and began looking around at other options. But it started me on my journey.

CC: It’s interesting that having declared yourself an atheist you were still looking at options or for some kind of spiritual tradition.

FORD: Yes, I was always a religious fanatic, always deeply involved in spiritual quest one way or the other.

CC: So then you went off to college?

FORD: No, no. I wasn’t raised in a family that went off to college. At this point I was a high school dropout, which was expected. I don’t have a high school diploma.

CC: You don’t?

FORD: I kind of enjoy that, although it caused some difficulty down the line. I found a job in a bookstore, working at Holmes Books in Oakland. I started as a stock clerk, then became a sales clerk. That was the beginning of what I did for my first career, the used and antiquarian book trade. It also provided my first education, spotty but wide reading.

While I was at Holmes and casting about, among the things I discovered was the San Francisco Zen Center. And that really clicked. I took the introductory instructions one Saturday. At the time I received a little list of affiliated communities, and found one in Berkeley. I began a several-year commitment to a daily sitting practice, moving into a commune across the street from the center for about a year.

CC: A Zen commune?

FORD: Just a commune. But about half the people who were living there were participants in the Zen center.

CC: This was in what years?

FORD: Sixty-six, sixty-seven, sixty-eight.

CC: There’s a lot going on in Berkeley at this time.

FORD: And I tried most of it.

CC: You moved into a commune and pursued a daily sitting practice. Who was your teacher?

FORD: I considered Shunryu Suzuki my teacher. But really he was a figure I heard give lectures every now and then. And even then I found him a very small figure, very far away; speaking in what my friends assured me was English. My real teacher was Mel Sojun Weitsman. He was the resident priest of the Berkeley Zendo. Actually at the time I first started sitting he wasn’t even ordained.

But there is no doubt in my mind today how much he was my teacher. There was an aspect to Mel’s practice of pure attention that set a tone and allowed me to begin to explore what Zen practice might actually be. Everything I learned later he telegraphed in the way he tended to that community at that time. But I was too dumb and young to know it.

CC: Being too dumb and young, I assume you didn’t stay there.

FORD: That’s right. I decided I wanted to be a Zen priest and that would solve all of my problems. The catch was that the Zen Center was already a rather large operation. It became clear to me that being a priest entailed years and years. Heck, I might even be twenty-five or more before I could get ordained. And I knew by then I’d have one foot in the grave and what would be the point of that?

By coincidence, around that time Jiyu Kennett arrived in San Francisco. She was an English woman who had gone to Japan and had studied at one of the major Zen temples, Sojiji, and was a fully transmitted Soto Zen priest. Kennett Roshi, we all called her "Roshi" was at the time on her way to London to start a Zen center similar in scope to the San Francisco Zen Center. She was there to learn what was going on, and decided she liked California. So she moved to a flat on Protrero Hill and announced that she was receiving. I was quite literally Jiyu Kennett’s first student in the US.

CC: So you really were her student. You were going to see her for instruction.

FORD. Yes. I received the precepts from her. Then she went off to England. Her mother and father had both died and she had to wind up the estate.

CC: So at that time you actually became a Buddhist, by accepting the precepts.

FORD: Well, someone’s a Buddhist when they decide they are a Buddhist. There is no formal requirement for entry through the mediation of somebody bestowing the precepts. There is a precepts ceremony perhaps more comparable to confirmation than to baptism.

CC: That’s what’s called Jukai.

FORD: Jukai.

CC: And you did it because you wanted to or she thought you should? Again, looking at someone who jettisoned all religions and suddenly is doing something like that.

FORD: Well, this is two or three years after I began Zen practice. When I first began, I was simply doing a discipline and at some point like the frog I got boiled and didn’t realize when I became a Buddhist.

CC: That’s the story of the frog that’s put in cold water and gradually the water is heated until it’s too late to get out. So, you got cooked.

FORD: I got cooked. So by 1969 I was a Buddhist and took the precepts and was formally Jiyu Kennett’s student. When she moved to England I moved into the flat on Potrero Hill, which was the temple, and began formal monastic training in the Japanese style. When she returned, I was ordained by her: "clouds and water."

CC: That’s the term for monk, for being a monk. The monkish way?

FORD: Monk, in the Japanese-derived ordination system, is a problematic term. Novice priest is probably the more accurate term, although there is a monastic training element as well.

CC: But the word in Japanese --

FORD: Is unsui, "clouds and water," which translates as monk or novice priest. It’s rarely translated as monk anymore. That’s a whole area of study. Richard Jaffe has just brought out the first serious examination of the unique evolution of Japanese ordination. The title of the book is telling: Neither Monk nor Layman.

CC: When you were ordained as a novice priest or monk, was it monastic as we think of it in the Christian tradition, including vows of poverty, celibacy, and whatever the third one is?

FORD: Obedience. I love it--that’s the one we Americans always forget. The Japanese have never reconciled the question of celibacy. Ordained leadership in Buddhism has always been monastic. While the precepts of ordination are different than those in Christianity, the obvious elements to an outsider would be celibacy, some sort of communal life, outward appearance—shaved heads, types of robes that one would wear, and dietary restrictions.

In Japan initially there was a shift from the vinaya precepts to Bodhisattva precepts. Vinaya characterized monasticism everywhere except in Japan. It included 250 vows for men and 348 for women, all rather detailed prescriptions on how one is to live. In Japan, as far back as the thirteenth century, they dropped the vinaya precepts and substituted the sixteen Bodhisattva precepts.

Originally they saw accepting those precepts as monastic ordination. Appropriate sexual behavior is one of the precepts but it actually doesn’t say celibacy. There was a gradual shift that came to a head about one hundred years ago when growing hair or eating meat or not being celibate were no longer governed by the state with criminal consequences. Directly out of that a large majority of Buddhist clerics in Japan married.

They’ve not yet reconciled the consequences. Today women who get ordained usually are celibate in Japan. But men who are ordained dress up in monk costumes during the day and for the most part go home to their families at night. It’s unresolved and a real problem in Japan.

In America we’ve inherited the problems. We haven’t found the solutions yet. The ordination I received at that time, how that was understood was that I was living under rule, that I had a human spiritual director, and my income was restricted to what could be earned without compromising my monastic life. We called ourselves monks. But I was married to someone who also took vows and was ordained.

CC: Was this Shasta Abbey where you were a monk?

FORD: We were not yet Shasta Abbey but rather the Zen Mission Society. While Jiyu Kennett was in England, she decided to bring people back with her and rented a big house in Oakland. She showed up with a large entourage, about 10 people, that had been involved in the London Buddhist Society in England. We acquired the property in Mount Shasta. In May 1971 she gave me her Dharma transmission, which in Soto tradition is simultaneously ordination as a full priest, Osho.

CC: And that is what makes you a sensei?

FORD: Right. The honorific is usually sensei, which means teacher. If you go to Japan every other person is a sensei. They teach something. Flower arranging, paddling canoes. Mine was in meditation and priest stuff. The practice of Soto, in addition to zazen, silent meditation, is attention to form. So in Soto there is much concern with liturgical life. I knew that stuff.

However, I was also supposed to be enlightened. In 1971 I was 23 years old. I had some real experiences. But I knew there was something wrong. I had experiences that would become the basis of my spiritual life, but these are not things as a teacher I would confirm so quickly today. Rather if I had a student reporting what I reported to Kennett Roshi, I would encourage that person to continue deepening. I knew there was something wrong and I left.

My then wife and I moved to San Diego and were soon divorced. I began casting about for what I might do. Among things, I looked at the Episcopal Church. I really liked its liturgical life, reminded me of Soto. I began dancing with the Sufis. I particularly liked that and it would become very important. I also fell in with the Gnostics. Specifically with the ecclesiastical Gnostics who had Episcopi vagantes ordinations. And I was ordained in one of those communities. But I was mostly interested in the Sufis. I moved to San Francisco to continue that training.

CC: Was that in a community? You were living in. . . .

FORD: A kankhah. That’s where I met Jan, who’s now my wife.

CC: A Sufi community. Is this a form of Sufism that is separated from Islam, a more universal form of prayer of worship?

FORD: Yes, it’s a heterodox form of Sufism centered on the personality of an early twentieth-century teacher named Hazrat Inayat Khan. I was made a teacher, which was very ironic. I understood the metaphysics. But this group was founded on music and spiritual dance and I couldn’t carry at the tune to save my life. I have since advanced to being able to carry a tune extremely badly. I wasn’t even a particularly good dancer.

Around this time I had also resumed sitting, Zen meditation. In the years after I left Shasta Abbey it had fallen away as a personal practice. Truthfully, very few people can sustain a personal discipline like Zen without a community. And I certainly was no exception.

We are now talking about the early 80s. Jan and I decided to start a bookstore in Gurneville on the Russian River, which is about sixty miles north of San Francisco, near Santa Rosa. I started a Sufi meeting on Thursday nights and because I had resumed sitting, as a support for my practice, opened the bookstore on weekday mornings for meditation. Nothing ever came of the Sufi group, but people started coming to the sitting group.

Most important for me among those was Jim Wilson, who had been a student of the Korean Zen master Seung Sahn, and was even at one time the abbot of their center in New York City. Jim left when he realized he was a monk to avoid facing his homosexuality. By the time he arrived he had found a life partner and had worked through his issues. He just wanted a place to sit.

The thing that I was fascinated by was koans. What I had done before was all shikantaza, the "just sitting" of Soto Zen. He had gone a long way through the koan training but had not completed their curriculum. That didn’t bother me. I pushed him to work with me on it, Actually bullied him into working with me. I vividly remember the first time we sat down in the store. There was nobody there. He asked me a question asked of Chao-chou: "All things return to the One. What does the one return to?" And I knew the answer.

CC: You did?

FORD: And gave it to him. At that point I found my practice. I knew this is what I needed to take the many experiences I had and give them direction, focus, and distillation, and clarification. We worked through, I don’t know, maybe two hundred cases over the next year or two. By the time he decided we had done as much as we could with koans, I was ready to both close the store, go back to school, get degrees, do that sort of thing. Also I had never had a formal student-teacher relationship with someone to study koans and I knew I now really needed a teacher.

CC: You discovered koan practice as the heart of your particular spiritual identity.

FORD: Yes, very much so, and it continued to be true. We closed the bookstore and I enrolled in Sonoma State in the Psychology program. Around this time I was also attending a Unitarian Universalist church. At that time two things happened in my life. One is I met John Tarrant, who was Robert Aitken’s first Dharma heir. John had just come over from Hawaii to finish his doctorate. We met within weeks of his arrival and not long after I started working with him.

CC: Did you meet him in the context of your sitting practice?

FORD: No. He came to the bookstore. I started a group for him. The second thing was my son from my first marriage come to live with us. And part of the deal was that we would go to church together. I had been attending the Unitarian church for the last year down in Marin County. I liked it. I liked the minister.

But it was too far away for the family thing, so I called up the local minister who I knew socially and asked what kind of youth program do you have. He said, What kind of youth program are you going to put together? So my mature Zen work and my Unitarian Universalist life came almost at the same time and always complemented and challenged each other. From there I finished the undergraduate program and enrolled in the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley as a candidate for the Unitarian ministry, started the second sitting group in Berkeley, which is now called the Oakland Zendo.

CC: This is one you started that continues today.

FORD: Well, the first one I started continues today as the Santa Rosa Zen Center. The second one is the Oakland Zendo. When I did my internship at the San Jose Unitarian church I started a sitting group that did not continue after I left.

Jan finished her undergraduate degree at Berkeley and I finished my M.Div. While still working on my MA in the Philosophy of Religion. I took my first pulpit in the suburbs of Milwaukee. There I started a sitting group that now continues as a branch of a little Soto community up in the Chicago area. We spent four years there, then went to Arizona. In Arizona, I was formally made a teacher by John in the Harada-Yasutani line and started a Zen sangha that continues as part of what’s now the Pacific Zen Institute. And then we came here.

CC: One of the questions that occurs to me as I listen to this overview of your progress is that you are both a former of communities—that is, you created or founded different sitting groups which have continued to exist in some form--and at the same time have made a choice to affiliate with an organized religion. Not that Zen isn’t an organized religion.

FORD: In the West it lacks many of the hallmarks that we consider essential to religious community, particularly for a family way of life.

CC: And Zen relatively new in this country. When you start talking about the lines of transmission of the different schools, we are still talking about a second or third generation.

FORD: Right, I’m considered a third-generation teacher. You can actually establish one plausible date for the beginning of Western Zen with the ordination of the first European American as a Zen priest and that is a little over fifty years ago. We’re very young in the west.

CC: So this is a new iteration of a religion in this cultural setting which is still finding its shape and form.

FORD: And not particularly successfully so far. It has two primary expressions currently. The smaller of the two are attempts at monastic communities, usually radically re-defined in one way or another and in every case somewhat problematic. And it’s just unclear where they’re going.

CC: Is that because they don’t know what kind of monastic community they’re forming or because they don’t know what religion they’re practicing?

FORD: Well the religion is not such a problem. It’s clearly Zen Buddhism and it’s usually Zen Buddhism derived from Japan. The problem is a confluence of the ambiguities of Zen in Japan—Zen institutions, Zen ordination in Japan—and our own, speaking as North Americans at least, our own rather materialistic assumption that we can have it all. Some very interesting things have happened but to even think that something might be successful is vastly too early. It’s all so wildly idiosyncratic that it’s impossible to say what the shape of the institutions will be if it survives.

CC: So you’re not really part of that group of people that speaks of Zen and Buddhism as if this really is a successful transplant.

FORD: Anybody who makes such an assertion has no sense of history. I certainly belong to the camp that wishes this to be so, and devote my life energy to this project. But anybody who thinks any religion is established in less than two or three hundred years just, uh, is an American.

CC: So, why affiliate formally with Unitarian Universalists when your intention is to be part of the community of people that’s forming Zen in North America?

FORD: First off I should say I alluded to the smaller of the phenomena of Zen in the West that are the attempted monastic institutions. The vastly larger and in some ways richer element has been to organize along the lines of schools or academies. There are priests as teachers and lay people as teachers for these organizations. But most everyone who practices in these organizations are not ordained.

One goes to study with a Zen teacher but one does not establish a congregation, anything that would be recognizable as a church or synagogue in the west. These have been more often truly institutes, or schools, whatever they’re called, and the people in charge are headmasters rather than ministers or priests. These are the most likely organizations one is going to encounter today when seeking a Zen center.

Now the Unitarian Universalist connection. I fall into a category of people who have been deeply moved by Buddhist teachings and the possibilities of a life in the Dharma--and have kids. There used to be a joke that is Unitarian is an atheist with kids. I’m a Buddhist with kids. There are a bunch of us. We are a small but I think interesting sub-community that has returned the enormous graciousness and welcoming of Unitarian Universalism by gifting them with our practices. And in this exchange of gifts we are well on our way to not being a "them" and an "us," but all part of the larger us.

CC: How has the Unitarian tradition looked at that? You speak of an us from your side. How does the Unitarian Church look at the Buddhists in its midst?

FORD: I think if one looks at North American Unitarian Universalist history, you can see about four major shifts in the theological self-understanding. The initial impulse was rationalism and the unitarianism was simply a consequence of the critical examination of the scriptures. The unitarian analysis was secondary to the rationalist impulse.

The second great wave after that was Transcendentalism, which was an attempted reclaiming of a sense of the sacred. And with that you begin to see the tension of Unitarianism between a rationalist impulse and a naturalistic spiritual impulse. We tended to weave back and forth. The next big movement was at the end of the nineteenth century and it finds its articulation at the beginning of the twentieth century as humanism. That was Unitarian Universalism for most of the twentieth century—extremely rational, socially engaged, and not real clear on matters spiritual at all.

And then there is now. The last fifteen to twenty years has seen a major shift—a fourth great shift, as I see it, in the movement, as yet ill-articulated. Now, in the last twenty years the leadership of the denomination have moved from being almost exclusively humanist to being almost exclusively people who would be defined loosely as being spiritually inclined.

Now what that means is, again, ill defined and uncertain. It has something to do with attention to interior life, something to do with seeing the human person as part of something larger than them. The image that has been associated with this is the interdependent web, and that has become the leading element of Unitarian Universalism.

CC: That’s a Unitarian Universalist phrase and concept?

FORD: It is. Every generation some Unitarians get together and attempt to describe the faith. It’s not creedal in the sense that they’re proscriptive but rather they attempt to be descriptive. Of course there’s always a tension over that. Even today what’s called the Principles and Purposes, the current document, I find people citing it in a creedal way. That probably means its days are already numbered.

The Principles and Purposes has seven principles. The first affirms the inherent worth and dignity of every person. The next five are rather high-flown abstractions about democracy, finding truth wherever you hear it. It’s noble enough. It’s hard to remember what they are. In the seventh principle, which was initially conceived of as an assertion of ecological consciousness, is respect for the interdependent web of existence of which we all are a part. And that image—which is rather larger than an ecological assertion, although subsumes ecology—has really caught people.

As a Buddhist I see these two, the first and seventh principles—the inherent worth and dignity of individuals and the interdependent web—as a sufficient expression of Buddhist insight, of the nature of how the world really exists. And we Buddhists have been sort of running with it. So, for instance in General Assembly this June I’m a featured speaker and I’m speaking on the Avatamsaka Sutra’s image of the jeweled net of Indra.

CC: It also occurs to me—I’ve noticed this and wonder what you think of it—that there’s also a sense in which Unitarian Universalism and Buddhism, particularly Zen, could be described as Wisdom traditions, each in their own way drawing on that strain of religious belief and practice which is rooted in Wisdom literatures across religious boundaries.

FORD: I think that’s absolutely true. Although in general I’d say that Unitarian Universalist approaches to wisdom have tended to be mired in knowledge. The shadow of Unitarian Universalist respect for the mind is collapsing into scientism. We do kind of fall back on that every now and then. But at our best, yes, it is a path of wisdom.

CC: And the Buddhist tradition doesn’t fall back on that.

FORD: Well, you can find schools—they all die out eventually. . . . .

CC: You said earlier that you see the Zen tradition as it is developing here and as you practice it as a teaching mode in an academy format. What makes Zen Buddhism a religion as opposed to a school for the passing of knowledge? What makes it different from this kind of scientific knowledge paradigm in the West about how we learn things?

FORD: Right, that’s the question: "What is wisdom?"

CC: You can answer that one since you’re being interviewed.

FORD: Thanks a lot. Let’s see. In the southern schools, the Theravada, there’s a romance with scientific language. They say it’s scientific and if you try the discipline you’ll achieve enlightenment. When you look at the assertions, what you get is not science but empiricism. I guess that’s proto-science, but there is no possibility of falsification. If you do the practice and you don’t get enlightened, then you didn’t do the practices right. So, there is an element of faith, at least in the sense that in order to engage in the practice one needs to believe that there’s a chance something can happen.

CC: And the something is, what?

FORD: Well that’s where it starts moving into an unproveable assertion, at least in an objective sense. But also here we start moving into the original mind, the great matter. What is the source of our consciousness? The initial Theravada impulse is around the observations that everything is impermanent, that there is no abiding self or soul, and that existence is contingent. Everything is causally related. By the time the Mahayana arises as a coherent perspective, it takes these three things—impermanence, contingent reality, and no-self—and subsumes them into that term, sunyata or emptiness.

And then we get a rather radical—you find this from Nagarjuna—assertion of the exact identity of this emptiness and the phenomenal world. And so we discover that who we are in this tradition is not a dream, not an illusion. It’s not false, but it is empty. This is really very simple. But the simplicity is slippery. And people have trouble grasping it. So, here is faith, faith in wisdom.

CC: Which is not to say that there’s nothing there.

FORD: It’s not to say that there’s nothing there. Emptiness has to do with impermanence, contingency, and no-self. It is a common statement that Buddhism is atheistic. In fact the Buddha didn’t have anything to say about a creator God. He considered that question belonging to a category irrelevant to the matter at hand, which was human suffering and how to get out from under it. But what he did say was about our belief in some permanent part of ourselves, a soul that is disconnected with the body. He did address this. The belief you and I possess some part of us that is eternal is disordered thinking and is in fact the first great symptom of the illness of the human condition--clinging to that which will pass away.

CC: And the clinging is the suffering.

FORD: Clinging to that which is impermanent leads to suffering, duhkha, the great anguish or anxiety that is ubiquitous in human existence. I tell people you can experience this emptiness. It is the field of consciousness just before the first thought, it is also the field of consciousness that is all thought; and how do you prove or disprove that. You have an experience that I as a teacher can confirm or not based on the traditions that have been handed down to me for checking people’s insight.

CC: And that is part of the structure of this teaching environment, of this academy, that there is a transmission of knowing from one teacher to the next so that there’s a kind of lineage that verifies where something comes from.

FORD: This is where it becomes a problem, because once you say it’s a knowing, it’s become an objectified thing that’s not the experience. Sometimes, in Buddhist logic you would refer to this as both knowing and not knowing, or perhaps better neither knowing nor not knowing.

CC: From the outside, if we look at this, how do we know that James Ford, excuse the expression, knows what he’s talking about? One way we know it is that James Ford learned from John Tarrant who was a student of, who was a student of. Is that part of what we mean by the lineage of a Zen teacher?

FORD: Well, lineage is an interesting and in its own way problematic situation. If you look at what Gautama Siddhartha said, he said, "No lineage." They asked him who would succeed him and he said, "The order will succeed me." Then in China, for all sorts of reasons, a little more than a thousand years ago, lineages emerged.

CC: So it’s a Chinese thing.

FORD: It’s a Chinese thing. When you start looking at the lineage charts, the Indian part of the chart that takes you back to the Buddha is simply haphazard listings of every prominent Buddhist name in India. They don’t even fit chronologically, much less their schools, or anything other than they were Indians.

On the other hand the story of transmission points to something real. I do believe that, in certain fundamental ways, I do see with the same eye that my spiritual ancestors did; in some sense we all see with the same eye as the Buddha. Is that a statement of faith, of fact?

CC: It’s certainly a statement that other Zen practitioners would recognize as reasonable.

FORD: It’s within the tradition. But my teacher says, "Lineage, who cares?" Are you awake? And that’s the bottom line for us. "Awake" is seeing simultaneously this emptiness and the phenomenal universe and acting from that place in an artful manner.

CC: Does this way of practice speak particularly to this culture right now, leaving aside the question of whether it is really growing or will last. It nonetheless seems to have taken root in interesting ways. As an Episcopalian I look at trying to get people to show up for anything that lasts longer than about twenty minutes as quite impossible and getting people to practice in any kind of disciplined spiritual way is equally difficult. And you pull people together to sit for nine hours at a time. What is that speaking to?

FORD: We’re definitely a countercultural phenomenon and I believe we provide an answer to the great question: Something’s wrong--what is it? And once I have some insight into that, how do I get past it? This dis-ease, this anxiety, this anguish seems to me a ubiquitous human condition. We’re not a spiritual practice for people who are making a lot of money and think that the world is just fine. We’re there for them when they lose their money or when their baby dies, when things fall apart. And from that distress and sorrow we offer something that I believe is true. We offer a way through to the source.

CC: Buddhism in the Mahayana tradition talks a lot about compassion, wisdom and compassion in Buddhism being equivalent in Christianity to justice and love.

FORD: Love and compassion are interesting in how they complement and challenge each other.

CC: In what way is Zen compassionate? How does it express that?

FORD: Well, this is part of the gift of the West and Unitarian Universalist perspectives. Buddhism in general, while it’s a calumny to say that Buddhism has been historically completely introspective and unconcerned with the world, still it hasn’t had anywhere near the social outreach that Christianity or Islam have.

CC: And it’s certainly had that rap—as being introspective.

FORD: The other side of that is the impulse that causes Christians to reach out to one another is also the impulse that causes holy wars. And so Buddhism has not been as good at building hospitals but it has managed to avoid any real holy wars in its history.

At the same time it needs a clearer vision in the life of the world. You see that in the emergence of Western Buddhism with terms like "engaged Buddhism," Bernie Glassman’s Peacemaker Order, and Robert Aitken, Joanna Macy and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Buddhist Peace Fellowship. There are thousands of little things that people do who are Western Buddhists. All expressions of this engaged spirituality.

And it’s a logical expression of this deep insight. The modern Zen master Koun Yamada uses a bad math analogy for the way the world really is. He suggests that if you take a fraction and you put anything in the numerator—a dog, a cat, you, me—and in the denominator he originally had zero but then he got fancier and used an infinity sign. You drop that in and we all arise out of emptiness.

You can see that more organically as being part of the same family. And so an ethic does arise out of that. It’s not quite Jewish or Christian ethics because in some sense it means we’re all equally clean including motes of dust and the nastiest bacteria you can think of. There’s a level of fundamental identity. Everything that is is part of the family too. So our ethics are going to be a little different. But they definitely involve some kind of reaching out to the world.

CC: I read somewhere that everyone you meet was once your grandmother.

FORD: Yeah, that would be a metaphor for incarnation.

CC: But in the sense that we are related like that.

FORD: Whether that’s literally true or not, it’s literally true.

CC: So you now have a new group that you’ve founded in West Newton which is called interestingly the Henry David Thoreau Zen Sangha.

FORD: Or, as many members call it, Hank.

CC: Why Thoreau? How does he get into that, other than the fact that you’re in his neighborhood?

FORD: There were multiple layers or reasons for that. One is I wanted to be able to instantly telegraph a relationship between Unitarian Universalism and Buddhism. And then you can make some interesting arguments for Thoreau as a proto-Buddhist. There’s a passage in Walden in which he makes a rather astonishing description of the deep samadhi state. He doesn’t use that word but he describes it. He did read Buddhist materials. And he is frequently credited with doing the first English translation of a Buddhist text. While that’s not true, he was the editor of the Dial in 1844 when it was published. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was the actual translator.

CC: So it makes a connection both ways. It’s an American Buddhist Unitarian-Buddhist crossroad.

FORD: And it’s meant to be fun.

CC: Earlier when I mentioned you had become a founder of several sitting groups, some of which continue, I wanted to ask whether you saw yourself in some particular way as a founder of groups, as a creator of something. Is there anything you can say about yourself in that?

FORD: Probably that’s for other people to figure out. Ironically I don’t think of myself as a founder, although obviously if you go back the list is relatively long. I’m an American, we’re fairly peripatetic. I’m a Californian. By the lights of my family upbringing, however, I’m a paragon of stability. Still, I have wandered a lot.

At each stage of my life there seems to have been product that follows in the nature of community. Certainly I’m deeply interested in community. Actually, I’m hoping that where I am now can be the beginnings of some deeper rooting. As a Unitarian Universalist minister it’s hard to stay in any geographic region. The one exception to that happens to be the greater Boston area. I’m there now, and serving a dynamic community where I think I can fruitfully serve for some time.

CC: So it’s partly the interest or need for or passion for community that leads you to do this?

FORD: All of that. I am deeply interested and concerned with the nature of community and what that means and how that might take shape. And that is part of what I am attempting to do now. For me the central question out of my training is how to work with people, with individuals, as a spiritual director and guide. But also I’m a theologian, a relatively systematic thinker. I have the kind of training that allows me to write and teach in that area. And much of this comes together with my concern for community.

CC: And in a funny way, even though you left the fundamentalist Baptist tradition when you were an adolescent, you immediately began doing all those things to try to shape your life in some way that is very much like it is. It’s almost as if you knew in the beginning…..

FORD: Well, I think that’s part of the human mind making sense out of things whether it’s there or not, but we can certainly see that the trajectory of my life has a coherence. But that’s probably true for all of us. And as I say if meaning isn’t there we’ll put it there.