An interdependent web: Interview with James Ishmael Ford.

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 Sangha (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 Cross-Currents. 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: Can we start with a little background on your own beginnings in terms of your spiritual tradition?

James Ishmael 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, and 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 was that in our community there was an absolute rift between Christians and Catholics. In fact, 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 that Catholics could be saved. And that small proto- universalism was a wedge for me in my own spiritual quest, that I did not have to be completely constrai ned by the rather deeply defined faith of origin. When I was sixteen I began to have serious doubts and by the time I was seventeen I decided I was an atheist.

KA: That went quickly.

JIF: Yeah, it was quick. It was not that unusual for my family. The women and children were religious and the men were drunks.

KA: So you jettisoned not only Southern Baptist but Christianity as a whole.

JIF: Right. Although I find it interesting that I chose atheism instead of agnosticism, agnosticism being the reasonable response to the information that we have accessible to us.

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

JIF: I think what I did was I made an impassioned assertion from which to begin. 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 Herd and Christopher Isherwood. Through it all I kept coming back to Vedanta and Ramakrishna and that kind of high end nineteenth and twentieth-century Hinduism.

KA: Did you follow that in some way?

JIF: 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. I found most of those in attendance were elderly women, probably primarily Theosophists, or at least they came to Vedanta by way of that. This is retrospective analysis. At eighteen or nineteen all I knew was they were not doing what I was interested in. The swami was extraordinarily boring and the service was only slightly different from protestant form. They had pews. I quickly lost interest in practical pursuit of Vedanta and began looking around at other options.

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

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

KA: So then you went off to college?

JIF: 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.

KA: You don't?

JIF: I kind of enjoy that, although it caused some difficulty down the line. I found a job in a bookstore, working at Holmes Bookstore 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. While I was at Holmes and casting about, among the many things that I discovered was the San Francisco Zen Center. That really clicked. I took the instructions one Saturday, 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.

KA: A Zen commune?

JIF: Just a commune. About half the people who were living there were participants in the Zen Center.

KA: This was during what years?

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

KA: There's a lot going on in Berkeley at this time.

JIF: And I tried most of it.

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

JIF: I considered Shunryu Suzuki my teacher, but in truth he was a figure I heard give lectures every now and 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 Weitsman Sojun. He was the abbot of the Berkeley Zen Center. At the time I first started sitting he wasn't even ordained, not that I would have been clear about that distinction. But there was an aspect to his practice of pure attention that set the 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.

KA: Being too dumb and young, I assume you didn't stay there.

JIF: 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 before I could get ordained. I thought that by then I'd have one foot in the grave and what was the point of it. By coincidence, around that time Jiyu Kennett arrived, an English woman who had gone to Japan and had studied at one of the major Zen Temples, Sojo-ji, and was a fully transmitted Soto Zen priest. She 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. She looked at California, she remembered London, and she decided to stay. She moved to a flat on Portrero Hill and announced that she was receiving. I was quite literally her first student in the U.S.

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

JIF: 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.

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

JIF: Well, someone's a Buddhist when they decide they're 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.

KA: That's what's called Jukai.

JIF: Jukai.

KA: 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.

JIF: 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.

KA: 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.

JIF: I got cooked. So by 1969 I believed I was a Buddhist and took the precepts and was formally her student. When she moved to England I moved into the flat on Portrero 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."

KA: That's the term for monk, for being a monk. The monkish way?

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

KA: But the word in Japanese....

JIF: 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.

KA: 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?

JIF: Obedience. I love it, that's the one we always forget. The Japanese have never reconciled the question of celibacy. Ordained leadership in Buddhism has been monastic and 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. In Japan initially there was a shift from the vinaya precepts to Boddhisattva precepts. Vinaya characterized all forms of monasticism except in Japan and included 250 vows for men and 348 for women and 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 Boddhisattva precepts. Originally they saw accepting those precepts as monastic ordination. Appropriate sexual behavior is one of the precepts but it doesn't say celibacy. There was a gradual shift that came to a head 100 years ago when legal consequence s of growing hair or eating meat or not being celibate were removed from the books of the state. Directly out of that a large majority of Buddhist clerics in Japan married. They've not yet reconciled it. Women who get ordained usually are celibate in Japan. Men who are ordained dress up in monk costumes during the day and go home to their families at night. It's unresolved and a real problem in Japan. In America we've inherited these 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 life. We called ourselves monks. But I was married to someone who also took vows and was ordained later.

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

JIF: We were not yet Shasta Abbey but the Zen Mission Society on Portrero Hill. While 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 ten 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.

KA: And that is what makes you a sensei?

JIF: 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 unique practice of Soto, in addition to zazen, is form as practice. So a great deal of attention is given to the style of liturgical life. However, I was supposed to be enlightened. In 1971 I was twenty-three years old. Even I knew I was not enlightened. There was something wrong then. I had experiences that would become the basis of my spiritual life, but these are not things today I as a teacher would confirm. I would encourage someone to continue. 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, but that was about it. I began dancing with the Sufis. I really liked that and it would become very important for awhile. I also fell in with the Gnostic s. Specifically with the Ecclesiastical Gnostics who had Episcopai vigantes ordination. I was ordained in one of those communities. But I was really interested in the Sufis. I moved to San Francisco to continue that training.

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

JIF: A kankah. That's where I met Jan, who's now my wife.

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

JIF: Yes, it's a heterodox form of Sufism centered around the personality of an early twentieth-century teacher named Hazrat Aniah Khan. Kabir Helmenski is in one of the branches of it. I was made a teacher, which was very ironic. I understood the metaphysics. But this group was founded on spiritual dance and I couldn't carry a tune at the time. I have since advanced to being able to carry a tune extremely badly. And I wasn't a particularly good dancer. Around this time I had also resumed sitting. It had fallen away as a personal practice. Very few people can sustain a personal discipline like Zen without a community. I was no exception to that. We are now talking about the early '80s. I decided to start a bookstore in Gernville 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 a guy named Jim Wilson, who had been a student of Seung Sahn, and was even the abbot of their center in New York City at one time. He left when he realized he had become 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. 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, "All things return to the One. What does the one return to?" I think that's Chao Chou. And I knew the answer.

KA: You did?

JIF: 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, one or 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. I had never had a formal student--teacher relationship and I knew I needed a teacher.

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

JIF: Yes, very much so, and it continued to be true. We closed the bookstore and I enrolled in Sonoma State College in the Psychology Department just to get an undergraduate degree. Around this time I was also attending the Unitarian Church. Two things happened in my life. One is I met John Tarrant, who was Robert Aitken's first Dharma heir. He had just come over to finish his doctorate. We met within weeks of his arrival and I started working with him.

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

JIF: No. He came to the bookstore. I started a group for him. He wasn't planning on starting teaching because he was finishing his doctorate. And then he was forced to start teaching. My son from my first marriage came 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. I just enjoyed it but it was too far away for the family thing, so I called up the local minister who I knew socially and said what kind of youth program do you have? And he said, "What kind of youth program are you going to put together?" So my mature Zen work and my Unitarian 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, and started the second sitting group in Berkeley, which is now called the Oakland Zendo.

KA: This is one you started that continues today.

JIF: 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. 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. Spent four years there, went to Arizona. In Arizona, I was formally made a teacher by John in the Haradi-Yasutani line and started a Zen Group that continues as part of what's now the Pacific Zen Institute. And then we came here.

KA: 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.

JIF: It lacks in the West many of the hallmarks that Westerners consider essential to religious community, particularly for a family way of life.

KA: And Zen is 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.

JIF: 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.

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

JIF: And not particularly successfully so far. It has two primary expressions currently. The smaller of the two are attempts at monastic communities, usually radically redefined and in every case somewhat problematic. And it's just unclear where they're going.

KA: 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?

JIF: 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 so wildly idiosyncratic that it's impossible to say what the shape of the institutions will be if it survives.

KA: 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.

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

KA: 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?

JIF: First off I should say I alluded to the smaller of the phenomena of Zen in the West and that is the attempted monastic institutions. The vastly larger and richer element has been to organize along the lines of schools or academies. One goes to study with a Zen teacher but one does not establish a congregation. A Zen Sangha as they've been forming them have been more often truly institutes, or schools, and the people in charge are headmasters rather than ministers or priests. I fall into a rather large 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: a Unitarian is an atheist with kids. I'm a Buddhist with kids. There are a bunch of us. We are a small but interesting sub-community that has returned the enormous graciousness of Unitarian-Universalism by gifting them with our practices. So we are well on our way to not being a them and us but part of the larger us.

KA: 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?

JIF: 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 Unitarianism was simply a consequence of the critical examination of the scriptures. The Unitarian theology 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. Therein 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 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. 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 has moved from being 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.

KA: That's a Unitarian-Universalist phrase and concept?

JIF: 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 fir st 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 Hua Yin Avetemsaka Sutra's image of the jeweled net of Indra.

KA: 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 may drawing on that strain of religious belief and practice which is rooted in Wisdom literatures across religious boundaries.

JIF: 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 scientism. We do kind of fall back on that every now and then, but at our best, yes, it is a path of Wisdom.

KA: And the Buddhist tradition doesn't fall back on that.

JIF: Well, you can find schools--they all die out eventually....

KA: 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?

JIF: Right, that's the question: "What is Wisdom?"

KA: You can answer that one since you're being interviewed.

JIF: Thanks a lot. I believe what makes Zen Buddhism a religion is that while in the southern schools, the Theravadan, there's a romance with scientific language. They say it's scientific and if you try the discipline you'll achieve it like that. When you look at the assertions, what you get is not science but proto-science. You get empiricism. 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. 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 change something can happen. Then one follows it.

KA: And the something is, what?

JIF: Well, that's where it starts moving into an unprovable assertion and here we start moving into the original mind, the great matter. What is the source of our consciousness? You find in the prajnaparamita sutras and literature the assertion of the exact identity of form and emptiness. The initial 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 makes 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.

KA: Which is not to say that there's nothing there.

JIF: It's not to say that there's nothing there. Emptiness has to do with impermanence, contingency, and no-self. Now, that last part, no-self, is the most radical assertion to theist religion because in fact the Buddha didn't have anything to say about a creator God. He considered that a category irrelevant to the matter at hand, which was human suffering and how to get out from under it. But he did say that the belief that you and I have any 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.

KA: And the clinging is the suffering.

JIF: Clinging 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, 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.

KA: 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.

JIF: 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 neither knowing nor not knowing, or both knowing and not knowing.

KA: 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?

JIF: Well, lineage is an interesting and in its own way problematic situation. If you look at what Gotama 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.

KA: So it's a Chinese thing.

JIF: It's a Chinese thing, and you can see it -- Chinese family lines and so forth. 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. One has to remember that I am not in an objective tradition. I stand in a tradition of some kind of realization that goes back a long way that has a whole lot of tricks of the trade. I do believe that, in certain fundamental ways, I do see with the same eye that my ancestors did, in some sense the same eye as the Buddha. Is that a statement of faith, of fact?

KA: It's certainly a statement that other Zen practitioners would recognize as reasonable.

JIF: 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.

KA: 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?

JIF: We're definitely a counter-cultural phenomenon and I believe we provide an answer to the great question: Something's wrong--what is it? How do I get past it? That 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.

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

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

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

JIF: 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 an introspective and unconcerned with the world, hasn't had anywhere near the social outreach that Christianity or Islam have.

KA: And it's certainly had that rap -- as being introspective.

JIF: 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, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. There are thousands of little things that people do who are Western Buddhists. It's a logical expression of this deep insight. Kuan 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 ari se 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 identity. They're 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.

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

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

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

JIF: Whether that's literally true or not, it's literally true.

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

JIF: Or Hank.

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

JIF: There were multiple layers or reasons. 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. While he was not the translator of the first Buddhist text in the English language, he was the editor of the Dial in 1844 when it was published. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was the actual translator.

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

JIF: And it's meant to be fun.

KA: 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?

JIF: 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 likes of my family upbringing, however, I'm a paragon of stability. I have wandered a lot. At each stage of my life there seems to have been product that follows in the nature of community. 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. Part of the great mix of making the decision that brought us here was the possibility of seeing one of these projects through for a couple of decades.

KA: So it's partly the interest or need for or passion for community that leads you to this?

JIF: 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 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 I'm deeply concerned with the shape of community.

KA: And in a funny way, even though you left the Southern 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.

JIF: 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 it isn't there we'll put it there.

Kenneth Arnold is a contributing editor of CrossCurrents.