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PODCAST

From the Pure Land Podcast

Impermanence is a core concept of Buddhism, so we understand that our lives can end in the next moment. But it took me 78 years of life and roughly four decades of practicing Buddhism to realize that I"m already in the Pure Land. Come join me there. melpine.substack.com

religion & spirituality buddhism

All Episodes

10:09

That Darn Moving Goalpost

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2026/01/07

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 when I decided some years ago to let go of my ego. It helps me now as I consider the various forms of

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6:23

Please Call Me Meathead...and Archie and Nick and Donald

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/12/17

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 writing it:When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the

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8:33

Stopping the Second Arrow: Buddhism's Essence

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/12/11

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 Westerners typically have about Buddhism, I realized I had expresed what, for me, is the core. Here’s the Q&A I

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2:31

Audiobook 'A Buddhist Path to Joy' Available for...

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/11/10

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, you can buy it for $6.99 on Apple. On Spotify, you can listen for free with ads, without ads for if you’re

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64:23

Bodhipakṣa's Path to an Awakened Heart

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/31

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. It offers his method for keeping to a daily meditation practice, with followup emails to keep you on

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11:29

Paths to Liberation: What Buddhism and Kardecism...

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/25

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 curiosity. But with millions of practitioners in Brazil and growing interest elsewhere, it deserves

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12:56

The Jazz of Buddhism

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/23

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 guess beginner’s mind isn’t part of their understanding.I’ve been criticized for using the phrase “New

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7:54

A Beautiful Rendition of the Heart Sutra

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/18

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. In it, the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara explains the nature of ultimate reality through the doctrine of

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16:36

A Deep Drive into Mahamudra and Tibetan Buddhism

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/15

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.To celebrate the publication date, I’m releasing Chapter 34 for free. As I appoached the end of the book,

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16:58

The Five Touchings

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/11

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 up to my memory of it, I’m once again recording my own.It’s a powerful—and emotional—meditation intended

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11:22

Channeling Thich Nhat Hanh for Today

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/10/05

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 because people choose forgiving things they should never have had to forgive over hurting people they have

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4:24

Why Everything's Perfect the Way It Is

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/29

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 keep it going is beyond human understanding. It’s the same for why your uncle got cancer or your cat died.In

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7:21

Why Religion and Politics Do Mix, and What That Means...

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/26

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.—John AdamsDavid 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 nations from the political brink.As a first-generation American, I think of my country in aspirational terms

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5:10

'Mel HP and Claude AI' in a Summary for Non-Nerds

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/14

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 interest in Buddhism or artificial intelligence, the message I felt driven to convey would be lost in the

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6:56

Certainty Is Our Enemy. We Can Be Certain of That.

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/13

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-pointing that began as soon as the news of Charlie Kirk’s assassination broke. As I’ll explain, I’m well

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5:00

Song of the Grass-Roof Heritage

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/13

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 and read it in a translation that didn’t do it justice. Now that I’m older and have a better translation,

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6:46

Disorder in the House

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/11

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, a representative in the Arkansas House insulted the Speaker during debate, and the Speaker responded by

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10:18

Using Buddhist Wisdom to Get Over AI Anxiety

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/10

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 photography didn’t exist, let alone the ability to stream videos to our smartwatches.Artificial intelligence is

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11:07

News About Books and Buddhism

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/08

Today's podcast is a newsletter about developments in books and Buddhism, particularly where the two meet.19 Killed in Nepal ProtestsAnger 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 BooksI’m a slow book reader, especially when engaged in maintaining this blog and podcast, providing content for my

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10:37

Sorry, but I've Done It Again

From the Pure Land Podcast ·

2025/09/03

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 research, each involving 20 to 50 sources. After each round, it found a gap in its “understanding” and began

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