I never had a bucket list until now—290 days before my 80th birthday. Of course, impermanence might put a hole in the bucket, but I’m not attached to it. I can’t be attached to it.
I hope to have my bucket list completed in those 290 days. Here it is:
Publish my next book, A Buddhist Path to Joy: The New Middle Way Expanded Edition. I’m on track to have it on the market around November 1. In addition to expanded content, the distribution will expand worldwide through a dozen channels in addition to Amazon.
Produce and release online a course based offering a Buddhist path to joy.
Write and publish a book with a title like Independent Publishing Made
EasyEasier.
Here are the cover and introduction for Book 2:
A funny thing happened on the way to my death.
That's the opening line of the introduction to The New Middle Way. I explained that, as 2024 started, with me approaching my 78th birthday in questionable health, I began preparing to die. That process led to an intervention—call it divine, if you like. The intervention led me to blog, podcast, and eventually write my first full-length book. My new mission, modern medicine, and ancient wisdom improved my health and the outlook for living into my ninth decade.
That was the funny thing.
Completing and publishing The New Middle Way evoked a second funny thing. My mission wasn't over. What I had learned by writing the book and reflecting on what I had written over the course of a year brought me to a new level of spiritual understanding and confidence in my ability to teach it. The result is this expanded edition, A Buddhist Path to Joy, and a companion course that I hope to have online by the end of 2025.
If you believe there may be celestial beings in another realm, you can give some of the credit to Buddha Amitabha. If not, it doesn't matter. The new middle way I suggest for the West returns to the core teachings of the Buddha. What you believe is far less important than how you live and whether the decisions you make and the actions you take reduce your suffering and the suffering of others.
My months-long, one-time project to share my spiritual lessons while I still could morphed into a years-long, multifaceted process. It all depends, of course, on my ability to keep breathing. One of the venerable Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh's meditations comes to mind:
Breathing in, I know I'm alive.
Breathing out, I smile to life.,
In doing that, I'll keep disseminating spiritual teachings into my mid-80s. That's my latest goal.
Take.a moment to reflect with me on impermanence. My journey transformed from preparation for death to passion for continued life.
I'm not interested in leaving a legacy. I've let go of enough ego that I don't care if what I teach remains associated with me after I have left the human realm. I do care that I have done my best while alive to manifest my deep, inherent desire to liberate others as well as myself from needless suffering—my bodhicitta.
In candor, I hope my books, blog, and possibly an online course produce enough income to cover my expenses and help my wife and me through our final years, but the driving force behind all of it is bodhicitta. My hope for income and desire to spread the seeds of a new Buddhist middle way combine in another way. Publishing this expanded edition takes what was originally available only through the Amazon and Audible channels and, with added content, distributes it through more than a dozen more.
Emaho!
That's a Tibetan word I translate as "Aint it great!" It's an exclamation of wonder and joy, and it describes how I see the transformation in my life over the last two years. In the words of my primary teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche:
If we transform our mind, everything we experience is transformed.
I can confirm that, and I invite you to join me in the land of joy and wonder, the pure land in which I live. I can't claim that reading this book will get you there. I can only offer you pointers toward finding your own way. I wish you a fulfilling journey.
These two volumes offer an experiential immersion into what I see as the essence of Buddhism. They're anecdotal and seldom linear. They avoid either/or logic in favor of both/and. Perhaps this famous line from the Heart Sutra defies cognitive understanding:
Form is emptiness; emptiness also is form. Emptiness is no other than form; form is no other than emptiness.
You can, however, experience it with an open mind—what Zen Buddhists call "beginner's mind," free of preconceptions. This book features "both/and" thinking frequently; its inspiration may have been a deity, or not, or both. Volume One is a nonlinear, anecdotal approach to the basics of Buddhism with details of my path and suggestions for yours. Volume Two goes deeper into what I can share about a path to joy.
In the Buddha's time and culture, traders used writing to keep track of their businesses. Spiritual teachers and students considered writing too mundane for recording sacred texts. They memorized, often employing verses and numbered lists to help them. The Buddha's teachings were passed down that way from generation to generation for over 400 years before they were first transcribed in the Pali language on palm leaves in 29 BC, roughly 450 years after the Buddha's death. These writings, plus some translated from other languages, form what's known as the Pali Canon—the earliest records of what the Buddha taught.
Many consider the Pali Canon to be the Buddha's word. When reading English translations, I imagine Siddhartha Gautama speaking. I talk and write as though I am quoting him. Given all the uncertainties about teachings passed by word of mouth over hundreds of years and then translated many times in various languages, I can't be certain that the quotes are accurate or even if they come from a single individual. But that doesn't change my reverence of the teachings and the story of how they were first articulated. The stories and teachings are real because of the wisdom within them and the millennia through which they passed.
The Pali Canon, organized into printed books, contains 40 to 50 volumes totaling more that 20 million words. For comparison:
Pali Canon 20 million words
Jewish Bible 300,000-320,000
Protestant Bible (including the New Testament) 783,000-790,000
Catholic Bible 800,000 to 820,000
Quron 75,000 to 80,000
And the Pali Canon isn't the end. As Buddhism grew out of the Ganges Valley and Southeast Asia, new translations and added material led to much larger Chinese and Tibetan canons. Thanks to diligent translators and the internet, much of this material is available on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer as well as printed books.
So, where does one start—how does one learn—to understand Buddhism? Some of us—maybe all of us—have an innate openness to the dharma (the teachings of the Buddha). For those of us in the West, perhaps something in our lives reached in and tapped into that openness. I detail how that happened, and continues, for me in Chapters 12, 13, and 14 of Volume One.
If you're new to Buddhism, or if you have just one toe in the water, one place to start is a book like:
What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula. It conveys the basics based on the Pali Canon.
Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das—a personal, informal, and anecdotal overview of the various schools of Buddhism written by a Vajrayana (Third Wave) teacher.
Discovering Buddhism by Dominique Side. For those who'd prefer a thorough, logical and sequential textbook written at the college-freshman level, this is a great choice. Like Lama Surya, Dr. Side is a Vajrayana Buddhist.
The Daily Buddhist by Pema Sherpa and Brendan Barca. A perhaps unconventional suggestion, but I appreciate experiential approaches. After a short and clear explanation of Buddhism, the authors provide 366 one-page entries. Each offers a well-chosen quotation followed by a brief amplification of the theme. You're not limited to one page a day, but if you go slowly through the pages, savoring and contemplating each, you'll end with a firm experiential base in Buddhism.
Books didn't become widely available in homes and libraries until the 19th Century. For more than 1,800 years after the dharma began to be transcribed and commentaries on it written, average people had access to it only from oral teachings. That's particularly fitting for a religion that gives loving-kindness, meditation, contemplation, and ethical living a higher priority than belief systems.
The two volumes that follow are my attempt to to offer you Buddhism and related spiritual thoughts in small doses, like the dharma insights you might get from a teacher in casual conversations over time. Consider this book a modern version of the way a householder a thousand years ago received ideas to consider from monks who gave blessings and teachings in return for alms.
I'm honored that you've chosen to pay some alms and read this book. I'll be even more honored if it helps you awaken to a joyful life in whatever spiritual tradition or life path you choose.
May every step of your journey be joyful.
Mel’s book, The New Middle Way: A Buddhist Path Between Secular and Ossified - Enlightenment for Regular Folks, is available from Amazon and Audible.
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