“The thread that binds these five pieces together is my concern to articulate a view of Buddhism that honours the Asian traditions while interpreting their insights in the light of secular modernity. The Agnostic Buddhist is the edited transcript of a talk I gave at Rochester Zen Center, New York, in 1996. It serves as a personal introduction to my agnostic approach to Buddhist thought and practice presented in Buddhism Without Beliefs. Six years later James Shaheen, editor of Tricycle, explored with me a number of the questions raised by that book. At the Crossroads is the edited transcript of that interview, published in the magazine in 2002. The Freedom to be No One was a paper given at a conference in Los Angeles in 1998 to a group of psychologists and psychotherapists. It explores the nature of human experience as understood from the perspective of Nagarjuna’s philosophy of emptiness and attempts to define the meaning and purpose of a personal Buddhist practice. The Director’s Cut interweaves an interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of the twelve links of dependent origination with a sequence of tableaux from a filmset in 1930’s America. It was an early, abandoned draft of the chapter “Becoming” in Buddhism without Beliefs. Creating Sangha was published in Tricycle in 1995. It is a reflection on the meaning and importance of community in a contemporary, non-monastic and largely non-Buddhist environment.”
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