Author James Ford is a trained Zen priest as well as an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. He’s been a pastor and preacher, and he also lived in Zen monasteries. This book creates a uniquely multifaith approach to the Zen way, with frequent quotations and references to Christian and Taoist sources, to supplement the many Buddhist ones.
Ford tells the reader where he’s come from: “In the Christian tradition heaven is the goal of our quest. It certainly is the language of my childhood experience.” But Ford aims to show, true to Zen and some progressive Christian traditions, that heaven is available now in the form of an “awakened life.”
One finds quotations from Catholic monk Thomas Merton and popular priest-author Henri Nouwen, as well as from the gospels and the famous “love chapter” from First Corinthians chapter 13 in the New Testament. But there are also many references to the fundamental ox-herding pictures in Zen (each of the ten pictures has a chapter to itself; there are thirty-three chapters in all), and to koans and teachings from the Blue Cliff Record and other core Zen sources.
All in all, Ford adeptly shows how both Christian and Zen mystical traditions share a path of “not knowing” and how “On this way we discover our path is one of ever-deeper intimacy: Intimacy with each other. Intimacy with ourselves. Intimacy with the cosmos.”
