If Youre Lucky, Your Heart Will Break: Field Notes from a Zen Life. By James Ishmael Ford. Wisdom Publications, Boston, 2012. 183 pages. $16.95.

James Ishmael Ford is known to many as a Zen teacher, a founder of the Boundless Way Zen Network in New England and a Unitarian Universalist minister who has served in many U.S. cities. Hes now based near Providence, R.I., with strong ties to the Boston area. As his biography states, he is one of the foremost proponents of an emerging liberal Buddhism in the West.

His new book, If Youre Lucky, Your Heart Will Break: Field Notes from a Zen Life, is many things. Those interested in the spiritual journey of an inquisitive and compassionate man coming of age in the sixties can track a serious, rigorous effort. His path has been neither easy nor straightforward. It is in the nature of a journey to find yourself discovering tangential paths that ultimately unite to form a singularly curious and fascinating adventure. He does say that there is happiness along this path.

Fords investigations his years spent in a monastery, his experimentation with LSD, his Baptist upbringing, his countless hours of meditations fueled by a disappointing thin vegetable soup, his study with Zen masters make up the man that is Ford and inform the unique offerings Ford brings to the communities he serves.

The book can also be viewed as a spiritual text, something to read chapter by chapter over the span of a few weeks. This slow reading is probably the best way to absorb If Youre Lucky because Ford has a lot to share. He addresses a readership he imagines has a genuine desire for depth in their spiritual inquiries.

Ford tracks the emergence and shaping of the various Zen practices in the West. From his studies he derives his most essential message that we are one. Zen is a way to arrive at that understanding and to foster it. He writes about enlightenment or awakening. Dont expect to find a simple or quick path to awakening in this book. Though we are all part of a single world, each of us unique individuals must find our own ways to awaken.

Youll learn how Zen practitioners meditate, what to look for when searching for a Zen teacher (Zen teachers are not guruswe are not perfect masters) and something about the koans (help with awakening rather than tests that need to be passed) that Zen students grapple with.

When considering a moral code or the way to live, Ford discusses the precepts that Boundless Way makes use of as well as precepts derived from Hebrew scriptures and the Noahide code. Not stealing, for example, is really about finding contentment with who we are, which, among other things, relieves us from coveting things. Also, this precept reminds us to respect what Ford calls the thingness of the world. As for intoxicants, there are two kinds those that diminish us and those that expand us. Life is full of intoxicants. Ford warns: Be careful. The intoxicants that expand us can also diminish us.

Zen, writes Ford, is a religion though a religion with a twist in that it is not overly concerned with cosmologies and the workings of gods at least as practiced in the West. But Zen does concern itself with the same questions as other religions life and death, suffering and salvation.

Ford writes, Perhaps the heart of the spiritual quest is the search for anything that can provide generally helpful rules as we try to live lives of worth and dignity. Zen practices are growing here in this country and, according to recent surveys (not cited in Fords book), traditional religious practices are experiencing a decline. One does not necessarily follow the other, but as Ford makes clear, Zen can be a deep, long-lived and reliable spiritual path that offers a moral code and a loving community.

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