TO BUDDHA AND BEYOND Part 1

In the winter of 2000, I found myself sitting cross-legged in the meditation hall of a Tibetan Buddhist center near San Jose, California. It was Tibetan in every way. The walls were lined with vibrant thangkas—painted Buddhas, deities, mandalas, protectors—each one a window into a symbolic world I could not decipher. At the front of the hall stretched a long altar crowded with golden statues, flickering candles, offering bowls, and fresh flowers arranged with ceremonial precision. The air was thick with the sweet smell of incense.

In front of the altar sat a throne—raised, covered in ornate rugs and cushions. A hush fell over the room. A roll of ceremonial cloth was unfurled, petals scattered across it. The teacher entered in a small procession of attendants and translators. Everyone stood, hands in a prayer gesture, heads bowed. After he settled onto the throne, the hall moved in unison: bodies lowering to the floor in full prostration, then returning to their cushions, adjusting seat pads to sit in the proper posture.

I followed along.

With one difference.

Inside, a voice was saying, “I’ve made the biggest mistake of my life…again.”

I

A year earlier, I had stepped away from the corporate world to take a sabbatical. I wanted to pursue my long-term interest in philosophy and the world’s spiritual traditions, and to understand what might lie beyond the corporate life I was accustomed to.

I spent that year reading a collection of books I curated to understand humanity’s spiritual traditions. The soaring prose of the Sufi masters. The exquisite insight of the Indian yogis. The history of Christianity and the mystical branch of Judaism known as Kabbalah. I read the majestic prose of great literature, such as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain; Western philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche; and modern science from Brian Greene, Peter Atkins, and others.

I read Richard Feynman, Anne Dillard, and John Searle, geniuses in their fields of mathematics, literature, and modern philosophy. I read Ken Wilbur and David Burns on psychology. I took a class in the Bhagavad Gita, probably Hinduism’s greatest classic.

And I studied Buddhism.

Collectively, these works confirmed what I had long suspected: there were hidden keys to human experience—fundamental shifts in perception—that could deepen how we live. Buddhism called to me the most. Not because it was better than the others, but because it felt both profound and practical. The Buddha positioned himself not as a god but as a guide. He urged his followers to investigate the mind and reality for themselves. His philosophy of the Middle Way felt clear, usable, and contemporary.

I was intrigued by Tibetan Buddhism. Its practices of deity yoga—visualization, ritual, mantra—hinted at a reorientation of the mind. I wanted to understand what this “inner technology” was. That curiosity had led me into that incense-filled hall, where I sat politely among the crowd.

This wasn’t my first attempt. I had visited Tibetan centers, Zen centers, and a few secular ones. Each time I left thinking, “This is not the Buddhism I’ve been reading about.” But something about this one day near San Jose—this throne, this procession, this reenactment of a faraway world—made the feeling unmistakable. There may be gold in those Tibetan hills, but it was buried so deep, and so far away from my modern Western sensibility, that I couldn’t imagine how I was ever going to access it.

In case you’re wondering why I felt I had made the biggest mistake of my life, again, the last time I had that feeling is when I joined Pixar in 1994. I had been hired by Steve Jobs to run Pixar’s business and, ostensibly, lead it to become a public company.

As I recount in my book, To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History, six weeks into starting at Pixar, I came home to my wife, Hillary, and said, “I’ve made the biggest mistake of my career.” Pixar felt like a corporate shipwreck. It had no idea what business it was in, had no money, no plan to make money, and had signed its life away to the Walt Disney Company for the better part of ten years just so it could stay afloat.

So I understood what that feeling was like.

I also understood the feeling of going for something crazy. Pixar should never have happened. It was a crazy bet that almost no one believed we could pull off. It was the kind of disbelief that made you want to prove everyone wrong.

I was starting to get that kind of feeling again, only this time about bringing Buddhist thought to modern life.

II

I returned from that experience in the meditation hall with what felt like a fire lit under me.

It struck me as absurd that we modern Westerners had to contort ourselves to fit another culture’s ways to benefit from that tradition’s wisdom. I didn’t think wisdom, if it was really wisdom belonged to anyone. Any real wisdom had to meet us where we were. It had to address our problems, in our time.

I began re-reading many of the texts I had already read with a new eye, a more skeptical eye. I no longer saw them as gospel truth. I wanted to sort out the wheat from the chaff. What was real, relevant, and spoke to today’s world? What was cultural, dogmatic, and a relic of yesterday’s world?

One of my favorites was Herbert Guenther’s Ecstatic Spontaneity, a little-known text on a mysterious Buddhist master called Saraha. We know very little about Saraha, besides that he lived in India some 2,000 years ago and was taught by a realized woman who became his wife. His terse poetry reads like a bomb going off on all forms of dogmatic and institutional religion, including Buddhist versions. Guether writes of Saraha:

He directs the process of spiritual development to an intensified experience of reality itself. This experience—an invigorating, humanly enhancing vision that does not lose touch with everyday reality but sees it bathed in a supernal light of beauty.¹

And

He is relentless in attacking prejudices accumulated through tradition or previous spiritual discipline. But his is not a deconstruction for deconstruction’s sake. His aim is always to clear the way to our luminous Self.²

Yes! Clearing the way. That hit the mark for me. A license from one of Buddhism’s most revered masters to escape the tradition’s dogmas and prejudices. As far as I was concerned, that meant game on!

We—or at least I—needed a spiritual tradition that welcomed modern knowledge and valued all the wonders of modernity: technology, medicine, discovery, art, music, all of it. And we needed it to fit into our lives. We were hardly about to abandon our families and responsibilities to join monastic orders. Nor, according to Saraha, did we need to.

The great irony, to my mind, was that this integration with local culture was precisely what happened in every culture in which spiritual teachings like Buddhism took root. There was no better example of that than in Tibet, where Buddhism had been imported from India and blended with local culture and traditions to the point of becoming unrecognizable as Indian.

Moreover, all of this seemed not just consistent with Buddhist thought but demanded by it. Front and center in many of its primary texts was the principle of inquiry and critical thinking. Buddhism prided itself on being an anti-dogma tradition. Even Buddhism’s most recognizable leader, the Dalai Lama, repeatedly said that if Buddhist doctrine were proven wrong by modern knowledge, it should be revised.³

Now I was convinced that the problem wasn’t with Tibetan Buddhist ideas or practices themselves. It was the culture around them. They were embedded in a 1,000-year-old Tibetan monastic culture that closely guarded access, was utterly foreign to us, and was unable—or unwilling—to update to match modern knowledge and culture. And why should it? It had lasted a thousand years in its present form, a beautiful tradition suited to its time. That Tibetan culture preserved this tradition for so long is a minor miracle—and one for which we owe an enormous debt. If we were to integrate the wisdom of that tradition into our time, the burden of that would fall on us.

I was also convinced that our culture needed Buddhist wisdom more than ever, a view that I feel has been validated again and again in the ensuing years.

III

Modern culture’s relentless focus on material success has brought great prosperity, but has fallen short in terms of inner well-being. We have more wealth, comfort, and technological power than any civilization in history, yet rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness continue to rise.⁴

One reason for this is an inverse relationship between outer prosperity and inner well-being. The very characteristics that produce material success—achievement, competition, long hours, constant availability, self-promotion—undermine spiritual wellness.

Moreover, the situation shows no signs of improving on its own. Globalization, social media, and now artificial intelligence are widening the chasms within humanity. Politics is becoming more polarized. Population shifts and migrations are straining once-stable societies. Reason and inquiry are giving way to technology-enabled rhetoric. And the dawn of AI is foreshadowing transformations that may dwarf everything we have seen so far. We are hurtling toward unprecedented technological power—with few tools to prepare us for it.

Along the way, we are also suffering from a loss of spiritual values that is taking a toll. I don’t mean spiritual in the praying or churchgoing sense. I mean in the human sense of heartfelt connection, community, feeling part of something bigger, and embracing wisdom that gives us perspective, insight, and a fresh, vital outlook on life. For this, we need a vehicle, a bridge, or a portal through which we can gain a new perspective.

I believe Buddhist thought can step into this gap—if it evolves to meet the moment. From its inception, it was conceived as a corrective force to the excesses of a growing civilization, the kind of excesses we are suffering from now. Think of it like a wave of insight coursing through humanity. Now it has reached our shores, and our challenge is how to catch it and ride it our way.

If we succeed in adapting Buddhist thought to our time, the reward is not merely a tradition reborn but a future where outer and inner prosperity can live side by side. Buddhism is not about escaping the world; it is about flourishing within it. The opportunity is nothing less than to carry forward one of humanity’s greatest legacies of wisdom, to reshape it for our age, and to expand the horizon of human possibility.

At last, I understood that the problem that made me so despondent in that meditation hall wasn’t me. It was that, on the one hand, a magnificent tradition for cultivating the mind had failed to find its way in a new world and, on the other, our fast-moving, tech-driven, performance-obsessed culture had lost sight of its spiritual ground. That didn’t make the problem any less daunting. It just brought clarity to it.

The first challenge was how to penetrate a tradition that was inaccessible to me. That challenge would take the better part of the next twenty years, testing me to my limits. I would never have been able to stick with it were it not for two individuals, one who rubbed my nose in everything I found off-putting in Tibetan Buddhism, the other who picked me up when I was down more times than I can count.

1. Herbert V. Guenther, Ecstatic Spontaneity: Saraha's Three Cycles of Dohā (Berkeley, Calif.: Asian Humanities Press, 1993), 40
2. Guenther, Ecstatic Spontaneity, 41
3. For example, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Path to Bliss: A Practical Guide to Stages of Meditation. Snow Lion Publications, 1991, p. 63.
4. CDC data show symptoms of anxiety among U.S. adults increased from 15.6% to 18.2% between 2019 and 2022, while depression symptoms rose from 18.5% to 21.4% (Terlizzi & Zablotsky, 2024; Brody & Hughes, 2025). The U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness an epidemic in 2023, noting that approximately half of U.S. adults reported measurable levels of loneliness even before the pandemic, with current estimates showing 20% of adults experiencing daily loneliness—an estimated 52 million people (U.S. Surgeon General, 2023).

I’d love to hear what you think. Please email me anytime with your questions and reflections. If something you share might benefit other readers, I’ll ask you if I can include it in future pieces.