To Buddha and Beyond

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Twenty-five years ago, I left the corporate world to study philosophy and the world’s spiritual traditions. I had successfully led the business of Pixar Animation Studios from a failing computer-graphics company into one of the world’s most beloved entertainment brands. It felt like the right moment to pursue my longstanding passion: to discover the sources of life’s depth and meaning.

Pixar was a rollercoaster of highs and lows. When I joined in 1994, it was a sinking ship. It had burned through nearly $40 million of Steve Jobs’s personal money with little to show for it. It lacked a clear vision or strategy and was unsure whether it was in the entertainment, software, or computer graphics industry. Worse, Steve himself was at a low point, having endured a string of failures, including his then-current company, NeXT Computer, since he had been forced out of Apple ten years earlier. Many were writing him off as a Silicon Valley has-been. Shaping Pixar into the company it would become was a harrowing journey along the precipice of failure, a story I share in my book, To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History.

This piece is the first in a series that tells a different story—what I learned in my twenty-five-year journey into one of the world’s great spiritual traditions: Buddhism—a journey I found to be as challenging and harrowing in its own ways.

Before taking Buddhism seriously, I spent a year studying the world’s major spiritual and philosophical systems. I’ve always been an avid reader, finding great pleasure in unraveling even the most impenetrable texts. I collected books on literature, philosophy, Eastern and Western religions, science, and psychology, and started to pore through them.

Among my favorites still today is the prose of the Sufi masters, whose insight and inspiration on human nature I find remarkable. There were also the Buddhist rebels, the mahasiddas they called them, iconoclasts who thumbed their noses at convention—especially religious convention—to touch the essence and spirit of what it means to be alive. Other sources of inspiration came from literature, such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a literary masterpiece about the transformation of a naive and unsuspecting young man during his stay at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps.

The process left me even more inspired. These were soaring tributes to the possibilities of humanity and experience. There was a life beyond the world of business and finance, and I wanted to find it.

I also wanted my life to continue as it was. I had a family I loved, my wife Hillary and our three children, along with broader responsibilities to family and loved ones. No part of me wanted to change any of that. In fact, I believed no part of me needed to change it. If any spiritual journey required me to give that up, I didn’t see it as authentic. Devotion to those close to me was one part of my life I could genuinely see as spiritual! So, I needed to find my way right where I was.

I started by visiting several local spiritual centers. Buddhism fascinated me the most. I was attracted to its beautiful philosophy of the Middle Way, its intellectual rigor, its anti-dogmatic sentiment, and, most importantly, its conviction that we can transform our experience for the better.

I remember attending my first Buddhist teaching at a Tibetan Buddhist center near San Jose, California. There I was, fresh from my reading quest, inspired with hope and possibility, and finally set to get my first taste of the real thing.

That bubble burst quickly.

I had landed squarely in the middle of another culture. A liturgy I couldn’t understand, what felt like a child-like subservience to teachers, and teachings that seemed out of touch with our world. It was a several-day event, over the course of which I slowly sank into the depressing realization that I was barking up the wrong tree.

I visited other centers, some Tibetan, some Zen, some more secular. Each time, a similar experience. I wasn’t just barking up the wrong tree. I was in the wrong forest. I felt let down and disappointed. It reminded me of my first days at Pixar. This was going to be much harder than I thought.

What to do.

As discouraging as these experiences were, they did not shake my conviction. I believed that the sources that had inspired me were real. That I couldn’t access them in my own backyard did not change that. I decided to continue studying on my own, focusing more on Buddhist texts, especially Tibetan Buddhism, which called to me the most.

Learning Tibetan Buddhism felt like trying to get a foothold on a steep mountain face. Thankfully, I found the works of some of the earliest Western Buddhist scholars to be extremely helpful, such as Edward Conze and Herbert Guenther. In Ecstatic Spontaneity, a book about the mysterious Indian yogi Saraha, Guenther writes: “We humans are fragmented and divided beings, at odds with ourselves and our surrounding world. We suffer from our ongoing fragmentation and yearn for a wholeness whose presence we somehow sense as the driving force in our quest for its recovery.” ^[1]

This resonated with me. I have long sensed the limits of modern culture’s reductionist view of life. Neurons, not feelings. Accomplishments, not experiences. Likes, not relationships. Resumes, not lives. According to Guenther, Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, directly addresses this issue. It did so through its insightful philosophy of mind and a set of practices unique to Tibetan Buddhism, known as deity yoga.

Deity yoga is a rich form of meditation in which we visualize images (deities) that represent the mind’s potential. Yoga means to link or unite, so by linking the mind with those images, we can manifest the qualities they represent.

Done correctly, these meditations can help us break our identification with unhealthy narratives and self-images, leaving us with a new freshness and vitality. There was something about these practices that felt essential—like they held the key I had been searching for. The challenge was that unlocking that door was almost impossible, so much so that if I’d known how hard it would be, I might never have tried.

The problem wasn’t with the philosophy or deity yoga 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 fit the needs of modern life. That culture almost went out of its way to make the intricate ideas about mind and reality that underlie deity yoga impossible to understand, embedding them in an ancient logic alien to us.

I came very close to giving up, and probably would have were it not for two individuals: my teacher of twenty-five years, Segyu Choepel Rinpoche, and my wife, Hillary. Rinpoche is a remarkable Vajrayana master with a sweeping vision for the future of the tradition. Without his insight and guidance, I would never have penetrated the depths of this path. Hillary, also a student of Segyu Rinpoche, is a great practitioner whose intuition and commitment to practice have kept me going more times than I can count.

Together with two other colleagues, Pam Moriarty and Christina Juskiewicz, we have dreamed of reimagining Buddhism for a new era, extracting the essence of Tibetan Buddhist ideas and practices from their traditional culture and integrating them into modern life.

My goal with To Buddha and Beyond is to share what I’ve learned on that journey. It will offer both philosophy and practice—ideas grounded in contemporary understanding, paired with practical ideas and meditations anyone can try. More than that, this will articulate a new perspective on life, one that integrates Buddhist insight with contemporary thought. I hope this sparks curiosity in newcomers, re-inspires practitioners struggling with similar challenges, and maybe motivates some to take up the mantle and help continue the work.

The reason I have persisted with this pursuit for so long is my belief that Buddhist thought offers a perspective we desperately need.

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.^[2]

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. 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.

Buddhism can step into this gap—if it evolves to meet the moment.

It is no secret that, in the distraction, pace, and commercialization of today, our world is suffering from a loss of spirituality. I don’t mean spirituality in the praying or going to church 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.

Buddhist thought is built to do this from the ground up. As we shall see, it is a corrective force to civilization’s excesses, exactly the excesses we are suffering from now. Think of it like a great 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 Buddhism to our time, the reward is not merely a tradition reborn but a future where outer and inner prosperity can live side by side. As we shall see, 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. I hope these essays will serve as a catalyst for you to glimpse these possibilities in your own life—and perhaps begin walking towards them.

To start, we will examine Buddhism in a nutshell. What is its main message? Why should we pay attention to it? I will take that up in the next essay, Please Tell Me Who I Am: An Unorthodox Introduction to Buddhist Ideas

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