It was time, I thought, to add more awareness of death and dying to my practice. Ideally, it’s part of everyone’s practice at any age, but we know how that plays out. Now, I was ready. I bought Andrew Holecek’s book Preparing to Die and loved it. Andrew writes and teaches from a deep understanding of Tibetan Buddhism, including study in Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Tibet, as well as a three-year retreat in Nova Scotia, Canada. He brings to that wisdom a thoroughly modern and nonsectarian spiritual and scientific perspective.

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That book helped me incorporate some Pure Land (explained in Chapter 6) teachings into my Vajrayana (Tibetan Buddhist) practice. In May 2024, I virtually attended Andrew’s Blissful Pure Lands Retreat and began bringing Buddha Amitabha (creator and overseer of the Pure Land) into my daily meditations as my venerated yidam (exemplar of all Buddhas). Around June 3, as I brought Amitabha into my consciousness, he seemed to tell me that there was more for me to do.

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You know how to write, and you know how to blog, he seemed to be saying, so go ahead and use those skills to manifest your bodhicitta (the deep desire to liberate others from needless suffering).

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That’s the creation story of my From the Pure Land blog. I issued the first post on June 5, 2014, and found myself turning out short pieces—five-minute reads—at an almost daily pace. People were reading them. In the first seven months, they reached about 15,000 unique users in 36 U.S. states and 18 countries. In September, I began podcasting and occasionally videocasting one of the From the Pure Land posts each week. Somehow, the magic of podcasting has introduced thousands of listeners in 55 countries to one or more of the posts.

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About that funny thing that happened on my way to death, my blog and podcast (and now this book) became my remaining life’s work and greatly improved my physical and cognitive health. (Modern medicine and ancient wisdom helped, too.) I still have no problem greeting death as a friend whenever it’s my time, but I also have an additional reason—and additional resolve—to stay alive and functional.

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I had set my 80th birthday—May 23, 2026--to evaluate my health prospects; now, it has become a date to celebrate. This book will have been in circulation for the better part of a year. If readers have found something fresh and helpful here, maybe it will help them on the journey toward spiritual wholeness. If it has been a flop, or if I die before I get to celebrate its success, I'll still know that I achieved something rare: distilling a lifetime of spiritual learning into 45,000 words that will be available to anyone who wants to find them.

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This book’s Epigraph is the poem by Walt Whitman about a noiseless patient spider exploring the vast vacant surroundings and launching filaments out of itself. He compares that to his soul standing in space and trying to connect. We are all that spider.

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It’s widely believed that the Buddha rejected the concept of a soul, but that’s a misperception derived from the intricacies of translating the ancient language he spoke into English. He rejected the Hindu concept of an Ātman—an eternal self that exists in every being as part of or in relation to a supreme being. It’s clear—to me anyway, as you’ll learn in this book—that each being’s pure awareness, its Buddha Nature, is like the concept of a soul.

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Whitman’s soul—however he perceived it—urged him to write in order to make connections. What was tricky for me was learning what was driving my urge to write, which started in childhood, as Whitman’s did. What I realized a few years ago was that mine was driven by my ego's urge to connect. That’s why I stopped writing. It wasn’t until my practice enabled me to write from my bodhicitta that I began again. It may sound ickily pretentious, but I believe it deeply, so I’ll send the words out there:

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This book is a filament of my soul.

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Rev. Dan King--a friend and Unitarian Universalist minister who helped me through a difficult period in the mid-2010s—wisely advised me to treat my blog posts as a continuing evolution of belief. Each one is what I find true here and now. Each one needs to be considered through the lens of impermanence and non-attachment, two pillars of Buddhism.

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As I began writing this book, the first in my 79th year of life, my 58th year as a writer, my 40th as a Buddhist, and my 16th as a blogger, I remembered Dan’s advice and want to emphasize it. Please consider what follows as, at best, a stumbling step in the winding path toward whatever is coming next for Buddhism, especially in the West.

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I won’t restate the case others have made that, especially in Western countries, people have become more isolated, alienated, and lacking a spiritual foundation. The classic in this area is Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000. Articles he has written since and a more recent book update his work. Vivek Murthy made a similar case in Together: Loneliness, Health and What Happens When We Find Connection.

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One measure of the collapse of membership in religious organizations is that roughly 40 million people—16% of the adult population of the United States—have left Christianity in two and a half decades. Overall, membership in churches, synagogues, and mosques dropped from around 70% of the U.S. public in 2000 to less than 50% in 2020.

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According to the Pew Research Center, seven in ten Americans consider themselves spiritual, but only two-thirds of that group also consider themselves religious.

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From my observations and from reactions to my blog posts, it seems clear that many in the West seek less dogmatic approaches to religion. We need more liberal religious alternatives to traditional Western places of worship and religious bureaucracies.

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A quick note: When I say East or West, I mean culturally rather than geographically. When I say West, I'm referring to places whose cultures are dominated, or heavily influenced, by migrations from Western Europe. Australia is a prime example.

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According to the Dalai Lama, every religion is a combination of philosophy and a way to change the heart and mind. In his book Approaching the Buddhist Path, he says:

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While big differences exist among their philosophies, all religions agree on the good qualities for human beings to develop. For some people, the Buddhist philosophy is more effective in cultivating these qualities. For others, the doctrine of another religion is more helpful. Therefore, from the viewpoint of an individual, each person will see one philosophy as true and one religion as best for him or her.

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Alternatives from the East are becoming more available in the West. Religions like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism provide less dogmatic and bureaucratic possibilities. I have spent four decades studying and practicing Buddhism. Because it’s what I know, this book is written in what you might call the flavor of Buddhism. Although I occasionally use Sanskrit, Pali, and Tibetan words, my intention is for Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Taoists, Confucianists, Humanists, those recovering from organized religion, those beginning on a Buddhist path, and others to taste an approach I’ll call a new middle way.

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When the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the bodhi tree, he found a middle way between self-indulgence (materialism) and self-denial (asceticism). Six or seven centuries later, his teachings had grown into a philosophy as well as a religion.

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The Buddha was not a Buddhist, nor a Hindu, nor a Taoist, a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim. He probably never intended to found a religion or especially a philosophy. He was concerned about needless suffering, which he often compared to an arrow. When shot by an arrow, one wants to get it out, not ask questions first about who made it, who shot it, what kind of bow he used, and so on. In other words, the Buddha considered ontological questions a distraction.

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Nevertheless, as Buddhism grew, so did ontological questions and conflicting points of view. Is there a real, substantial world out there (form) that we misperceive, or is it all a dream (emptiness) that exists only in our minds? Is there a real, continuing self even though it’s made of components that change from moment to moment, or is there no self at all? Is it entirely an illusion?

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The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna (150-250 CE) is most closely associated with the second Buddhist middle way, which found a path between the extremes of form and emptiness and the extremes of self and no-self. His philosophy, Madhyamaka, uses what’s known as the “two truths doctrine” to resolve those questions. I’m neither able nor willing to explain the doctrine in detail, but from this lay practitioner’s perspective:

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We function from day to day in relative reality. We couldn’t get through the day if we didn’t see ourselves and others as having form, but in ultimate reality, neither we nor what we perceive has form. Logically, form exists only from a perspective of emptiness, and emptiness exists only from a perspective of form.

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In much simpler terms, there’s no this without that, no here without there, no front without a back, no happiness without sadness, no form without emptiness, no self without non-self. To reach enlightenment is to understand that fully (from an experiential and not merely conceptual base).

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If this is new to you, now would be a good time to take a few breaths and not sweat the details. Just go with the flow.

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I wanted to explain the second middle way before suggesting a third. Don’t get me wrong. Let me say this in bold italics:

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I'm no Nāgārjuna.

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I depend on commentaries on his works to understand what he wrote.

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I’m just a kid from a row house in Philadelphia with no credentials other than a long life with lots of trauma, 40 years of study and practice in teachings from every wave of Buddhism, and skill at taking what’s complex and explaining it in a simple, informal way, without screwing it up too much.

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New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in his February 1, 2025, article Looking for Faith? Here’s a Guide to Choosing a Religion, wrote:

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Fortunately for the would-be seeker, this challenge is overstated. The ultimate goal of the sincere religious quest is a relationship or an experience of grace that can’t be obtained through reasoning alone. But for the open-minded person who hasn’t received divine direction, a religious quest can still be a rational undertaking—not a leap into pure mystery but a serious endeavor with a real hope of making progress toward the truth.

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With that context, I’ll modestly offer my suggestions for a middle way along the 21st Century path through the beautiful and fragrant forest of Buddhism. I encourage you to find your own in your chosen faith, but here’s my attempt to leave some breadcrumbs to help guide you.

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You might think of the route as a middle way between faith in everything and faith in nothing—or both.