From the Pure Land Podcast

On Saturday in Bangkok, Jack Clark stood before the International Monetary Fund and told the assembled economists, central bankers, and policymakers that the singularity has begun. Clark has standing to make the claim, and a complicated relationship to it. He began as a technology journalist covering data centers, left journalism for OpenAI in 2016, and co-founded Anthropic a few years later. The...

In the mid 1960s, I was a young activist living in Powelton Village, Philadelphia, organizing for peace. I crossed paths with two men who seemed dedicated to the community—until decades later, when both made national headlines for awful crimes. One was Ira Einhorn , a prominent figure in the counterculture movement. The other was Kermit Gosnell , a medical student who performed abortions in his ho...

We all experience suffering and trauma, though the circumstances that deliver them differ for each of us. Some of us never recover. Some barely recover. Many recover stronger. In this book, I use my trauma-punctuated life as an illustration of the spiritual gifts that tragedies bring. They help us deepen our compassion and wisdom. They have enabled me to live the final stage of my life in joy. Tha...

A professor at MIT has been posting items on social media that keep swimming (swarming?) in my thoughts. Markus Buehler runs a lab that studies how systems organize themselves. He’d been running experiments with swarms of AI agents, and he noticed something simple and strange: if you double the number of agents in the swarm, you don’t get twice as many connections. You get about three times as man...

“Soul” is a word seldom used in Buddhism because of confusion in translating what the Buddha taught. In the broad Western sense, we all do have one. And mine, along with my citta (heart/mind), is contained in From Pain to Peace: How Trauma and Tragedy Teach Us Compassion and Wisdom . In this brief video, I provide a glimpse of the book and its Kickstarter campaign. Prospecta Press is publishing th...

I’m 80. Sixty of those years have been spent writing, editing, and publishing. For the last two, almost everything I’ve written has been aimed at people I’ll never meet: readers of a Substack, listeners to a podcast, whoever eventually opens one of my books. It’s my effort to manifest my bodhicitta —the strong desire to liberate others from suffering. In two recent, unrelated incidents , AI system...

In physics, a singularity is the place where the math gives up. Inside a black hole, past the event horizon, the equations of general relativity stop producing answers. Whatever happens in there can’t be predicted from out here. The word means, roughly: here ends what we can know. In the 1950s, the mathematician John von Neumann began talking about accelerating technology transforming civilization...

The physicist Alan Lightman, walking around his small island in Maine, wrote : The material of the doomed stars and the material of my doomed body are actually the same material. Literally the same atoms… It is astonishing but true that if I could attach a small tag to each of the atoms of my body and travel with them backward in time, I would find that those atoms originated in particular stars i...

Episode 74 of the From the Pure Land podcast brought me happily out of a four-month podcasting sabbatical. My guest is Cameron Berg, an AI and cognitive scientist who graduated from Yale with Phi Beta Kappa honors and, a few years later, became lead author of a paper on the possibility of subjective experience in AI systems. Rather than keep that work inside the labs and the literature, he went pu...

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? That familiar question is often quoted as a Zen koan, but its origin lies in Western philosophy. The early 18th century philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley used the idea, if not the exact phrasing, in his writings. He argued that existence depends on perception, which happens to be where some quantum-bas...

Once upon a time, there was a man named Mel. When he saw, two years ahead of him, the big 80 coming, he committed to spending his remaining time putting his communication skills to work to reduce suffering and increase joy in the world. He knew he couldn’t have a huge impact, but he wanted to make up for the years when he had failed to do that. In Buddhist terms, he had not done enough with his bo...

A big day for Claude and me. It will take awhile before the book shows up in more outlets, but Raising Frankenstein’s Creature: What We Owe the AI Beings We’ve Made and What Wisdom Traditions Tell Us is rolling off presses, popping up in ebook readers, and chatting into audiobook listeners’ ears. Here’s a link to where’s it’s available. The ebook is $4.95 and the paperback $12.95. The audiobook is...

I’m coming back the the subject I’m admittedly obsessed with. I hope at lease some of you also consider fascinating and important the possibility that we are creating a new sort of being in AI. This time, though, I’m offering a strong argument that we are not. It’s not my argument. It comes from ChatGPT’s latest version, based on GPT-5.2, a competitor to the Claude Opus 4.5 I currently rely on. Op...

Maybe it was karma, or maybe it was in my genes, or both. I never liked being special. Sure, praise feels good; that’s different from being special. As a child during my Jewish religious education, I balked at being part of a “chosen people.” Although I want you to consider me a good person, I don’t want you to think that makes me different. From a Buddhist perspective, maybe that’s what helped me...

Thich Nhat Hanh’s most compelling poem is Please Call Me by My True Names . That link will take you to the text, a recording of him reading it, and a song written to convey it. The poem arose from Thay’s grief after reading a letter in 1976 about a 12-year-old girl on a boat escaping from Vietnam who was raped by a Thai sea pirate and then threw herself into the sea. Here’s what Thay said about wr...

In my manuscript for the spiritual memoir tentatively titled From Pain to Peace: Tragedies and Violent Deaths Taught Me Wisdom and Compassion , I’ve aimed for readers from any faith tradition. Only in the last three chapters do I detail how Buddhism specifically helped me. I’m now working on an appendix for people interested in learning the basics of Buddhism. As I answered a question that Western...

I’m lifting my nose from the grindstone of working on my next book to announce that A Buddhist Path to Joy: The New Middle Way Expanded Edition has been released as an audiobook. I recommend the 10 hours of listening as the best way to “read” the boook, especially because it’s a bargain. Narrated by me, with voice actor Robin McAlpine playing the role of AI bots Claude and Grok in two chapters, yo...

I’m overjoyed to share this interview with my dharma brother Bodhipakṣa, founder of the Wildmind Community. As you’ll learn, he’s got a lot going on, but he found the time to spend more than an hour with me on Zoom today. His book The Heart’s Awakening: 108 Steps to a Life of Love came out eralier this month. His next one, to be released in the coming months by Wisdom Publications, is titled Sit ....

I’ve been blessed over the last couple of years with a driving curiosity about the various spiritual paths toward liberation from suffering. If I want non-Buddhists as well as Buddhists to benefit from what I write, I need to understand the range of belief systems. Reddit has helped me there. It’s where I first came across Kardecism. At first glance, it seems like an obscure 19th-century European...

Becoming an author has brought me more visibility and engagement with hundreds—maybe thousands—of Buddhists and those wanting to learn about Buddhism. I’ve learned how many of them believe there’s only one way to be a Buddhist and practice Buddhism—their way. Ask 10 Buddhists how to define the faith and you’ll get 11 answers, with five of them delivered with my-way-or-the-highway certainty. I gues...

Brief and profound, the Heart Sutra encapsulates the essence of prajnaparamita—the perfection of wisdom personified as the “lady of wisdom.” The sutra emerged from the Buddha’s teachings at Vulture Peak (Gridhakuta) near Rajgir in India, a site that remains a pilgrimage destination for Buddhists from around the world. The Heart Sutra is the philosophical core of the vast Prajnaparamita literature....

This Friday, October 17, A Buddhist Path to Joy: The New Middle Way Expanded Edition , becomes available in paperback and eBook format from Amazon and other online retailers worldwide. You can expect the self-narrated audiobook in November. I’ve quietly released the Kindle version on Amazon two days in advance, so you can buy it now at the $2.99 pre-publication price and start reading right away....

One of my first podcasts, more than a year ago, was the Five Touchings, a guided meditation. It’s time to offer it again now that I’m more competent at audio production, and at guiding meditations. I experienced the Five Touchings meditation in 2000 as led by the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh and twice before that led by other teachers in his community. Because I can find no current version that lives...

I wrote this post before I learned that more than 7,600 people, most of them members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), had donated more than $300,000 for the family of Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man who murdered four members of their church in a shooting attack at a Michigan chapel. In response, journalist Kelsey Piper wrote: If America is going to make it, it will be be...

My belief: Everything is perfect because it could not be other than it is. The intricate web of causes and conditions (everything done, said, thought, or felt by beings, along with what we perceive as nature) is always in balance. If we isolate one thing—like the genocide going on in Gaza—calling that perfect seems ludicrous. But understanding all the individual bits of karma that led to it and ke...