From the Pure Land Podcast

Dear Andrew, My Spiritual Friend:

In my last blog post, I encouraged living with gratitude, and here I am expressing some of mine. After you helped me find the key to unlock my bodhicitta a year ago, you opened the door wider by taking the time to read my soon-to-be-published book and writing this about it:

Mel Pine has distilled a lifetime of learning and packaged it in the most caring heart. This is a delightful book dealing with noble truths that will benefit many.

That endorsement from one of the most prominent...

The Brahmaviharas, or Four Immeasurables, are guides to infinite love for all beings. As I described them here, they are:

* Loving Kindness: An attitude of boundless goodwill toward all beings without attachments or expectations.

* Compassion: Arising from loving kindness, it’s the sincere commitment to work to end the suffering of all beings.

* Empathetic Joy: Taking delight in the success and happiness of others without envy or resentment.

* Equanimity: Remaining balanced and impartial through life’s ups and downs and accepting all beings as equal.

For many of us, the...

Writing a book has taught me about many things—ego prominently among them.

Over an almost 60-year professional career, I had come to think of myself as good at writing, editing, and managing publications—that is, a person with certain skills. As I completed my book manuscript, I began to take on another role—a person who has written a book and is shifting into the business side of publishing it. That involved two labels: author and independent publisher.

Labels, though, are fictions. The author label is particularly dangerous for the person being labeled. It’s a buil...

On April 10, I posted the Epigraph and Introduction of my forthcoming book, The New Middle Way: A Path Between Secular and Ossified, which is scheduled for publication this summer. The book combines explanations of Buddhism for beginners with glimpses of the path that has brought me to a joyful life. The portion I shared on April 10 was largely anecdotal, so I’m now releasing a more teacherish chapter. These two sections will remain available here on my From the Pure Land blog and podcast and on my new website for anyone who’d like to read or listen to a sa...

The journey toward publishing my first full-length book is progressing better than I had hoped. I now expect a release date no later than August. I’ve begun an author’s email list, website, and Facebook Page. The results from early reviewers are encouraging, with one reader saying:

The best book I’ve read on Buddhism…a gift to the world.

So, it’s a good time to make the book’s first 2,000 words available to anyone who wants to read or listen to them. Please share this post and podcast with your friends.

From the P...

May all beings be happy. May all beings be healthy. May all beings live with ease. May all beings live in peace. May all beings live in pure joy, free from bias and hatred.

Words similar to those are expressed out loud or prayed silently thousands, maybe millions, of times a day around the globe. They are known as the metta prayer or blessing, and in meditation, they cultivate loving kindness toward oneself as well as others.

Find a favorite place to meditate. Get into your favorite meditation posture, whether that's sitting on the floor...

The mind, hard to control, Flighty--alighting where it wishes-- One does well to tame. The disciplined mind brings happiness. --The Dhammapada verse 35

I realized this morning that, for me, the First Precept…

I refrain from taking life.

…applies to the monkey mind.

What’s the monkey mind? It’s that aspect of your mind that likes to chatter “bada-bada yada-yada” all day. It likes to travel through the branches and vines of your mind, leaping from one to the other while chattering loudly. It says things like:

* I want the bright...

As I drafted the book The New Middle Way over the last eight months or so, my self-image changed. While my roles as husband, father, friend, student of Buddhism, and myriad other things remained, my identity as a writer, blogger, and editor began to change.

I was now working on the first full-length book to be published under my own name. As I researched, wrote, and edited my work, my confidence grew. Even though I relied heavily on my A.I. research assistant, Perplexity Pro, I began to own a feeling of expertise about my subject matter...

When Dominique Side wrote a series on her Substack, The Softer Gaze, about her recent encounter with cancer and the resulting surgery, I thought that would make a great subject for her second From the Pure Land video interview. An expert on Buddhist philosophy, Dominique is a delight to talk with, as I learned in our first discussion.

I wanted to hear how her decades of Buddhist experience prepared her for illness and other traumas and share some observations on my own. While we were at it, I learned that she has a timely book, A New...

In my March 10 interview with Jordan Bates, he mentioned this quotation from Carl Sagan, the brilliant scientist and communicator:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

It’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard about the interconnectedness of everything—what Buddhism calls dependent origination. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

My former teacher, the Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, often said:

I think the word interbe should be in the dictionary. “To be” is to interbe...

Since Kenna Day entered my life as my son’s partner, I’ve enjoyed conversations with her, especially the probing questions she asks and the topics she raises on life, writing, and literature. So, I had the brainstorm of asking her to interview me for a video podcast. She accepted, and we both enjoyed doing it. We hope you enjoy watching or listening to it.

We did have some technical problems. Because I failed to push a button when I should have, the sound of Kenna’s voice had issues until I remembered to push that button. So, af...

* What’s ahead for spirituality in the West?

* What happens to us after we die?

* Is reality real?

* Are stories real?

* What is reality anyway?

* What is Buddhist emptiness?

* What is Direct Heart-Opened Experience?

* Are “magic mushrooms” an opening to transcendence?

* Is there a suprapersonal God?

Jordan Bates and I answer those questions and more…

Just kidding! We don’t answer them, but we have fun dancing around them (and more) in this 55-minute video. We hope you have fun watchi...

It was a joy this morning to spend 45 minutes interviewing Tara Mandala Executive Director Cady Allione and Chögé Lisa Erickson about that worldwide organization, which was created by Lama Tsultrim Allione, who traveled to Nepal and India in 1967 hoping to learn to paint mandalas and ended up with that and much more. She was one of the early pioneers in bringing Buddhism to the West.

While Lama Tsultrim is on a solitary retreat, Cady and Lisa spoke with me about Tara Mandala, some of its programs, especially Feeding Your Demons, and its Yana social networking platform, wh...

The essence of my practice is connecting with my pure mind, or my Buddha Nature. Teachers in the Dzogchen and Mahamudra traditions have pointed the way for me. If you are unfamiliar with the terms, there’s no need to distinguish between these slightly different ways to reach that inherent Buddha Nature. Just find the teacher you’re comfortable with to help guide you.

Machig Labdrön (1055-1149) founded several lineages in the Mahamudra Chöd tradition. Chöd literally means cutting through. As a practice, it refers to cutting through the connection to your demons, especially the ego...

My flow of blog posts has slowed because I’ve been finalizing my book proposal. I’ll have it ready for my chosen publisher by Wednesday. To keep my subscribers and podcast listeners supplied with a steady flow of my words of wisdom, I’m making today’s release of a draft book chunk free to all.

My experience in the writing, editing, and publishing universe confirms my belief in impermanence. Everything I plan and write now is tentative. It’s a long way from final (if anything ever is). Today’s release is for a book section wher...

I had the pleasure today of interviewing Beth Korczynski, director of philanthropy for Tergar International, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche’s worldwide organization. Tergar’s reach extends worldwide, so it’s accessible to almost anyone at any level of experience in meditation and spiritual practice.

Beth and I discussed:

* Tergar’s culture of openness and transparency. The ethics of transparency.

* The Anytime Anywhere Meditation program, which can help with meditation for people with any religious background. Tergar trains teachers for the program, and you may be able to find one in your area by using this lis...

Maybe impermanence works faster in science than in poetry. I learned recently that the initial singularity model for what led to the Big Bang is already outdated. Who knew? It will take a lot longer, though, for poetry about it to be outdated. A case in point is Marie Howe’s poem Singularity, which I mentioned in a previous post and recite in this podcast.

Meanwhile, modern visionaries are combining philosophy with science, especially quantum physics and artificial intelligence, to grope for models of reality. I find the ideas of physicist Federico Faggin, who designed the first mi...

What about fully claiming that Buddha within you? So many of us think we’re not yet there; we have more work to do before fully realizing our Buddhahood. We go from teacher to teacher, each telling us we fail to grok it because it’s so easy. Maybe there’s one more book to read, or another thousand hours of meditation practice will get us there.

I’m not knocking books and meditation practice. The proverbial God knows I’ve read plenty of books and meditated for many hours, but there’s no “there” to get to. Our Buddhaho...

Live your life fully. And use every moment, every opportunity, in a way that is beneficial for oneself and for others. If we live every moment the same, in a positive, peaceful, and kind way, then death is also another moment—the same. So there’s no difference. —Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche, as quoted in Andrew Holecek’s book Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition.

This From the Pure Land Post can be listened to on a podcast app or RSS feed. It can be read as a blog post or watched...

Be careful.

The moment you start talking you create a verbal universe, a universe of words, ideas, concepts and abstractions, interwoven and interdependent, most wonderfully generating, supporting and explaining each other, and yet all without essence or substance, mere creations of the mind.

Words create words, reality is silent.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

Billions and billions of words have been spoken and written to help guide people toward a state that can’t be described in words—enlightenment. Billions and billions of words have been spoken and written about upādāna—the Pali and S...

Often, in Buddhist texts, the “eight worldly concerns” make their appearance. This verse, for example, is part of my daily practice:

I will learn to keep all these practices Untainted by thoughts of the eight worldly concerns. May I recognize all things as like illusions, And, without attachment, gain freedom from bondage.

What are the concerns that taint daily life? The Buddha lists them in Lokavipatti Sutta. As translated by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, the sutta begins:

Monks, these eight worldly conditions spin after the world, and the world spins after these eight worldly conditi...

We have to learn the art of stopping—stopping our thinking, our habit energies, our forgetfulness, the strong emotions that rule us. —Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022)

That’s a good subject to talk with your chiropractor about when you’re lying facedown on her adjustment table in an office adjoining a shopping complex as the December holidays approach—the art of stopping. It’s what happened to me yesterday.

I had already decided that, because of the hectic season, my next podcast would be a guided meditation listeners could use whenever they find themselves busily bee-ing and...

Many of us have mixed emotions about special days—those days designated for us all to feel and act in a certain way. The goal of From the Pure Land is to spur and encourage you on whatever path feels right for you. In that spirit, to explore aspects of generosity, I thought I’d present the ideas of Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer from a pro and con standpoint—food for thought on Giving Tuesday Eve.

You may be familiar with Singer because of his best-known book and his website, both called The Life You Can Save...

I find it curious that every year, Americans slaughter 50 million turkeys to express their gratitude. —Bhante Gunaratana

I chose that quotation not because I believe everyone should abstain from eating turkey but rather to question how we express gratitude. This blog post and podcast are intended to raise questions for contemplation. Answers—if there are such things—are up to the individual.

The idea for this post came when I was meditating in one room, and my wife listened to a dharma talk in another. The bits that filtered into my consciousness had to do with g...

When I launched From the Pure Land as a blog almost six months ago, I was comfortable writing but not public speaking. My mild cognitive impairment (MCI) resulted in too many pauses for me to grasp and say the word I was looking for, and sometimes, the word I spoke was not the one I intended.

As it turned out, the more I exercised my writing neuronic connections, the more the speaking connections improved. I still speak slowly and make mistakes, but I felt ready to start podcasting, which is easy to add to Substack blogging. So...

Just as the ocean has a gradual shelf, a gradual slope, a gradual inclination, with a sudden drop-off only after a long stretch; in the same way this Dhamma and Vinaya has a gradual training, a gradual performance, a gradual practice, with a penetration to gnosis only after a long stretch. —From the Uposatha Sutta translated by Thanissaro Bhikkhu

The quotation above will serve as the entry point for our second From the Pure Land Back to Basics post. The first one also came after a period when I had wandered into political and social issues.

...

My wife, Carol, had outpatient knee replacement surgery yesterday, Election Day, so we both went to sleep around 11 p.m. East Coast U.S. time. At 3 a.m., after I awoke and got a pain pill for her, I checked the election returns and decided to write and record a quick post and podcast with quotations about all of us and the world being perfect as we are because causes and conditions produced us. We and the world could be no different than who and what we are.

And just as people accept what comes and make...

Today’s podcast and post is about “the clear and empty nature of the mind,” which you may hear referred to as rigpa or simply as nature of mind. Resting in the nature of mind is the heart of my Buddhist practice. As long as I can find that state and remain in it, I can handle any situation along the path—usually in a joyful way but always with kindness and compassion for myself and others.

I kid you not. I believe that peace of mind is available to every one of us.

Learning to find...

Below is a lightly edited version of the transcript, which isn’t perfect. I advise listening to the recording. [I also made a big mistake in the recording. I’m 78 years old; not 87. And I meant to mention an article by Andrew Holecek about the bardos. The idea is that some of the preparation for the death bardos can help with life’s bardos. Here’s the link to the article.]

Welcome to an episode of the From the Pure Land podcast. I'm Mel Pine.

I just took a little breath, a deep breath, and suggest...

I couldn’t be happier with this first From the Pure Land interview—except that:

* There’s a weird silence at the beginning.

* Toward the end, you’ll hear a quotation from the Dalai Lama read twice, but please continue until the strange long silence at the end. You can skip that.

* A few other glitches because of my inexperience with the technology.

As a Buddhist blogger, it’s essential to maintain my equanimity. I know that life is perfect as it is because it is shaped by causes and conditions, and there could be no other way. And I know that every moment is impermanent—those I like and those I’d prefer not to live through. So I take everything in stride and hope to pass that state of mind on to readers and listeners.

As an American voter, I’m concerned about what seems to be a pivotal crossroads for the United States. On November 5, we will elect ou...

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The image came to me as I considered a brief way to describe tonglen, the Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice of breathing in the suffering of others and breathing out healing. We receive what’s broken and return what’s whole.

The practice of kintsugi, which began in 14th-century Japan, demonstrates how beauty can be found in imperfection. It’s linked to the philosophy of wabi-sabi, acceptance of impermanence and imperfection. It may be that wabi-sabi is related to early Japanese Buddhism and Ze...

I’m about to give vent to my contrarian side. Before I do, though, let’s consider what civilization was like when Gautama Buddha began teaching and as Buddhism spread throughout South, Southeast, and East Asia.

Siddhartha Gautama was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in what’s now Nepal, near the border with India. He taught there and in the Ganges Plain and acknowledged spiritual roots in the Indus Valley. It’s generally believed he lived for an 80-year span between 560 and 400 BCE.

We can’t know the texture of day-to-day life there and then...

Equanimity…is the quality of heart that balances the movement of the heart with wisdom. Equanimity allows us to care, while also owning the limits of that care…. It is not detachment, because our heart is still engaged. We learn to take wise action when appropriate, and we let go of attachment to outcomes. —The Tattooed Buddha

Inspired by my dharma siblings, with whom I sit for an hour every morning via Zoom, I wrote and recorded a meditation to help us all balance our empathy with our equanimity during these troubled times. No matter how comfortable our in...

No words can describe it No example can point to it Samsara does not make it worse Nirvana does not make it better It has never been born It has never ceased It has never been liberated It has never been deluded It has never existed It has never been nonexistent It has no limits at all It does not fall into any kind of category. --Dudjom Rinpoche on the nature of mind

Thanks to my dharma friend and fellow blogger Chodpa for reminding me of that quotation in his September 25 blog post, which you can read...

I won’t claim that I invented the meditation I’m about to guide you through. It’s adapted from other sources. For example, here’s a video of an hour-long dharma talk called “Taking Refuge in the Island Within Ourselves” by Sister Chân Đức in the Plum Village monastery and retreat center in France: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5J4N989CeU

I’ve added a twist or two I haven’t seen before, even though I’m sure I’m not the first to think of them, and combined it all into a guided meditation. I’d...

After three decades of practicing Theravada (foundational) and Mahayana (second wave) Buddhism, I was still confused about one thing. As far as I could tell, every form of Buddhism teaches that all beings have the Buddha Nature within or at least the potential for enlightenment, but it always seemed distant—not within reach.

I certainly didn’t consider myself a Buddha, but my meditative experiences had convinced me that Buddhahood or some form of enlightenment was closer than I had been led to believe. It was within reach. During the second half of 2015, I expanded my spiritual hori...

In the 1980s or ‘90s, Thich Nhat Hanh and his longtime companion, Sister Chan Khong, turned a ritual called the Five Prostrations, with roots in Theravada Buddhism, into a profoundly healing meditation they called Touching the Earth—one easier for Westerners to practice. I’ve had the privilege of doing the meditation led once by Thich Nhat Hanh in Vermont and once by Sister Chan Khong in Virginia. It brings me into vivid touch with interconnectedness and my place in the world whenever I do it.

I've recorded this version for anyone who'd like to try it. Listen...

The perfection of loving-kindness is the wish to provide for the welfare and happiness of the world, accompanied by compassion and skillful means; literally, it means benevolence. —Insight Meditation Center

Here's a 20-minute Metta (loving-kindness) meditation for beginners as well as the more experienced.