The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

After the creative wonders of the Critical Turn #1, we have the magical appearance of Daniel Ingram in two conversations covering a great deal of ground. Our first conversation covers a wide range of topics from practice to waking up, from generation-X to cynicism. The second covers a series of posts from the Speculative non-Buddhism site called Trash Theory. We discuss the SNB briefly and then ta...

Critical turn #1 On a deep dark night in a deep dark wood, something strange happened over at the Imperfect Buddha podcast. Was it a moment of folly? Was it a moment of genuine madness? It remains to be seen. But one thing is for sure is that a critical turn took place and in good company too. For in that deep dark wood there was a gathering and a fire and those who turned up were Samuel Beckett,...

This is the second instalment of my wide-ranging conversation with Ken McLeod and Hokai Sobol. It features an extended introduction that is, in part, a response to feedback from episode 50, and I invite our more critically leaning listeners to gift feedback on what is an ongoing experiment in crafting conversations that will increasingly respond to the challenges raised and explored throughout the...

This is a quick introduction to help you on your way through the new season of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast. After a year of traipsing the globe with academics in an outrageous attempt to address the anti-intellectualism rife across Buddhism, and spirituality more generally, we have landed with both feet on the ground in the terrain of practice. The challenge for this season is clear: to approach...

We have come to the end of our series engaging with academics from the world of Buddhist studies and other relevant disciplines and what better way to complete it than with an interview with Donald S. Lopez Jr. Donald is the Arthur E. Link distinguished professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at Michigan University and the well-known author of many books on Buddhism. He specialises in late India...

We reach our penultimate episode in this series with Buddhist academics. Richard K. Payne is former Dean of the Institute of Buddhist Studies and Yehan Numata Professor of Japanese Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies at Berkeley. Richard also trained as a Shingon Priest, and provides interesting insight into Buddhism at his blog, Critical Reflections on Buddhist Thought. We get s...

Here we are, the last in our three-part series on Buddhist Modernism, post-Modernism, and what comes after. We hope you've enjoyed it and found it educational and are ready for the final run. Professor Ann Gleig joins the podcast from sunny Florida for a discussion of her brand new book 'American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity'. Our discussion centres on her text and expands out to touch on iss...

In this second part of the series on Buddhist modernism, Buddhist post-modernism, and what comes next, I interview David L. McMahan, who is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in the US. David is the well-known author of The Makings of Buddhist Modernism, which had a serious impact on more learned, thinking Buddhists in the West who were willing to cha...

Date: Saturday, February 23, 9am-1pm, at Culture Works in Philadelphia Cost: Pay what you can, upwards to $90. For more than a decade, movement-based scholar AK Thompson has worked with Benjamin to weigh in on the key debates of our crisis-filled era. From engagements with pop culture’s latent promise to critiques of the cherished certainties that guide movement struggles, he has foregrounded the...

“All Buddhism is Cultural Buddhism.” Scott Mitchell is the Rev. Yoshitaka Tamai Professor of Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Studies at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley and the author of "Buddhism in America: Global Religion, Local Context"(2016). His research interests include Buddhism in Western contexts, Buddhist modernity, Pure Land Buddhism, translocal religions, ritual studies, and media...

Does western philosophy lack imagination when thinking about rebirth and reincarnation? What would Wittgenstein say? This episode features Dr Mickel Burley, a philosopher of religion from Leeds university in the UK. He wrote a fascinating book called Rebirth and the Stream of Life, which inspired me to have him on. He’s a big fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein too and we get to talking about a man who is...

Hey, it’s 2019 and we’re off to a bang with two new episodes! The first one is quite the experiment with our first guest host filling in for the mysterious, ephemeral stranger that is Mr Stuart Baldwin. Our first intrepid visitor is Gavin McCloskey from Northern Ireland has been China based for quite some time. He is his own man of course, and he brought some fine questions along for us to discuss...

Date: Saturday, January 19, 9am-1pm Cost: Pay what you can: Suggested amount: $90 Facilitator: Joshua Ramey is a writer, teacher, and activist who studies political economy and anti-capitalist political theory. He holds a Ph. D. in philosophy from Villanova University (2006) and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at...

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm received his Ph. D. in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2006 and is tenured at Williams College in their Religious Studies Department. He has three primary research areas: Japanese Religions, European Intellectual History, and Theory more broadly. He has been working to articulate new research models for Religious Studies in the wake of the collapse of pos...

Dale S. Wright is distinguished Professor of Religion at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He is author of The Six Perfections: Buddhism & the Cultivation of Character, and Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism. He is also coeditor with Steven Heine of The Koan: Text and Context in Zen Buddhism, The Zen Canon: Textual Foundations of Zen Buddhism, Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History o...

Our year long jaunt through the world of academic engagement with Buddhism continues. In this episode of the Imperfect Buddha Podcast, we talk to William Edelglass, professor of Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and Buddhist Studies at Marlboro College. William has been a teacher in a variety of settings, including a federal prison in New York, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Nepal, and for many...

What is attention? Where are the boundaries between 'my' individual attention and that of those around me? Whose paying attention to what? And, what are the consequences of how attention is manipulated and manufactured by the media and by ideology? Yves Citton explores these questions and many more on the podcast today with special attention paid to his fantastic book "The Ecology of Attention" wh...

This week, you lucky listeners get two episodes for the price of one! Unusually for the podcast, we recorded two episodes back-to-back in just two days and for this reason they are kin, intimately connected, and shall go forth into the world as such. Each one shares the same intro, but don’t panic, it’s relatively short. Both conversations were less structured than usual. I did have questions, but...

This week, you lucky listeners get two episodes for the price of one! Unusually for the podcast, we recorded two episodes back-to-back in just two days and for this reason they are kin, intimately connected, and shall go forth into the world as such. Each one shares the same intro, but don’t panic, it’s relatively short. Both conversations were less structured than usual. I did have questions, but...

Our second podcast episode for the week is for Incite Seminars with regular guest Glenn Wallis. As per usual, our conversation takes many interesting and creative turns, and is longer than the usual Incite seminar podcasts. We discuss the topics of Unlearning, education versus learning, and introducing radical ideas into Dharma halls, as well as much more. As indicated in the introduction to this...

This week regular listeners to the podcast will be fortunate enough to get two episodes in a single week. The first will be with Charles S. Prebish, a figure well known in Buddhist studies. Charles has written classic volumes in Buddhist studies such as Luminous Passage: the practice and study of Buddhism in America and masses of articles. He was also a pioneer in the establishment of the study of...

John Paetsch joins us for a short chat about his upcoming seminar for Incite. We discuss Deleuze, philosophy, freedom and what you might expect from the event. I also add an extended introduction for listeners so that that they can contextualise the topic and understand better why we are promoting Incite. The event page is here.  Matthew O'Connell is a life coach and the host of the The Imperfect...

In this episode, Ron Purser comes on to the imperfect Buddha podcast to talk about neoliberalism and its impact on mindfulness, Buddhism, spirituality, and the experience of all these in the individual and the impact is greater then you likely believe. You are a neoliberal subject to some degree and the ethics and manner of practice of this insipid ideology has seeped into almost all contemporary...

In this episode of the imperfect Buddha podcast I speak with Glenn Wallis again. We cover a range of topics but at the core of our discussion is darkness: a topic that many folks shy away from and yet in our problematic times is a theme that needs looking at more closely and more deeply. Glenn will be leading a workshop on darkness on 4 August in Philadelphia. If you’re interested in participating...

Welcome to a new project. The Imperfect Buddha podcast is collaborating with Incite seminars by bringing you short podcast interviews with workshop facilitators at their upcoming events. This is done to promote such seminars, but more importantly, to spread the good word, and collaborate with like-minded folks. Incite seminars act as a breeding ground for intense engagement and enquiry into the hu...