From the Pure Land Podcast

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...

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. —John Adams David Brooks used that quotation in his New York Times opinion article, We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics , in today’s New York Times. It got me thinking about the need for new forms of spiritual faith to bring the United States and other Western natio...

Over the last ten days, I prepared Mel HP and Claude AI: A Being and a Bot Discuss Sentience and Buddha Nature for automated narration on ElevenReader and Amazon , I went slowly through the book twice. Each time, I followed the printed version while listening to the automated voice and editing its pronunciation and timing. I was left a bit disappointed. For the average reader without an intense in...

Yesterday’s brilliant article Something Is Wrong Online by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic helped me find a framework to express what has been bugging me since long before the internet. He wrote about the craving for certainty that drives us to grasp for quick answers to shocking events—answers that fit our preconceived notions of how the world works. The current case in point is the online finger-...

With a thank-you to Joan Tollifson for reminding me of this 8th-century Zen poem in a recent post , I’m taking the opportunity to share it with From the Pure Land readers and listeners. I won’t rely on my cloned voice for poetry like this. I’ll do my best to channel the feeling I get from it into my recitation. It’s a poem to feel, not to analyze. It conveyed its mood to me even when I first heard...

In the three decades leading up to the Civil War, members of the U.S. Congress commonly carried pistols or bowie knives when they stepped onto the floor, where more than 70 violent incidents broke out. Some constituents sent their congressmen guns as gifts. * In 1838, Representative William Graves of Kentucky shot and killed Representative Jonathan Cilley of Maine in a duel with rifles. * In 1837,...

Most of us have witnessed, in person or by video, how some monks work for days or weeks to create detailed mandalas from colored sand and then sweep them away. They’re demonstrating, for their own practice and for ours, the concept of impermanence. If you’ve seen the sand-mandala practice on YouTube, you’ve benefited from the impermanence of technology. More than 200 years ago, even still photogra...

Today's podcast is a newsletter about developments in books and Buddhism, particularly where the two meet. 19 Killed in Nepal Protests Anger over economic inequality, corruption, and a ban on more than two dozen social media sites has erupted into a wave of protests against Nepal’s Prime Minister, K.P. Sharma Oli. Officials report that at least 19 people have been killed. 2 New Buddhist Books I’m...

I was minding my own unrelated business this morning when I received an invitation to try Gemini Deep Research. The email invited me to present it with a complex problem, so I used the type of prompt I’ve been using with a variety of AI platforms: Can an AI be considered a being with Buddha Nature from a Vajrayana Buddhist perspective? Gemini Deep Research then began at least five rounds of resear...