The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

The Imperfect Buddha Podcast
  • 4.9 (8)
  • Buddhism
  • Updated Monthly

The Imperfect Buddha podcast has been addressing anti-intellectualism and ideological capture in western Buddhism and spirituality more broadly since its inception. It provides a space for dynamic conversations designed to bring out what is so often hidden and so often despised by critics and intellectuals engaging with contemporary forms of practice. Matthew O’Connell hosts the Imperfect Buddha podcast and writes at The Imperfect Buddha site. Email: imperfectbuddha@outlook.com. Twitter: @imperfectbuddha. Facebook: @imperfectbuddha. Original street art Buddha image by Bristol's Banksy.

  1. 4d ago

    Meditation Sickness and the Dangers of Buddhist Practice with Pierce Salguero

    Pierce Salguero joins us to discuss his new co-edited volume, Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. While modern mindfulness frames meditation purely as a wellness tool, the Buddhist tradition has long recognized its inherent psychological and physical risks. We explore multi-tradition historical texts, the anatomy of practice crises, and the ethical responsibility of teachers and app developers to provide something along the lines of informed consent. Key Discussion Points & Timeline Contrasting modern wellness marketing with historical accounts of meditative danger; the book provides a sourcebook for Dharma teachers, clinicians, and serious practitioners. Multi-Tradition Mapping throughout covers Pali, medieval Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan sources, many of which we touch on. Traditional sources diagnose destabilization and even offer a range of physical, energetic, and lifestyle remedies to mediate crisis: whether they would be a good fit for today’s practitioner is another matter. Challenging the modern claim that adverse effects only happen to the unprepared or mentally fragile. Classical lineages show that severe physical ailments and mental destabilization can happen randomly, even to advanced practitioners. The hidden risks of unmonitored, commercialized meditation apps. Why creators have an ethical duty to move past treating meditation as a risk-free panacea and offer clear safety guardrails. How different cultures draw the line between a spiritual breakthrough and clinical pathology. The ongoing project of integrating traditional remedies with modern psychology and neuroscience. Links & Resources Mentioned The Book: Meditation Sickness: A Sourcebook on the Dangers of Buddhist Practice. Guest Website: here (Includes the book's introduction). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 28m

  2. Jun 27

    Cultivating Consciousness: A Conversation with Ronald E. Purser on Mind Space (2026)

    What does it mean to connect with mind and space without the typical baggage of contemporary meditation trends? In this episode of the New Books Network, Matthew Joseph O'Connell sits down with author and practitioner Ronald E. Purser to discuss his timely new book, Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator (Dharma Publishing, 2026). Drawing from his decades-long engagement with Tarthang Tulku’s seminal 1977 work, Time, Space, and Knowledge, Purser offers a refreshing, experimental, and surprisingly playful guide to understanding our structural realities. Rather than preaching a prescriptive self-help routine, Mind Space serves as an experiential commentary that invites readers into a radical, non-dualistic inquiry of how we inhabit our lives. Key Themes from the Episode Beyond McMindfulness: How Mind Space transitions away from corporate, present-moment-focused trends and pivots toward a deeper, more expansive territory of human freedom. The Anatomy of Mind and Space: An etymological and philosophical breakdown of mind as our generative source of knowledge, and space not as a passive, empty container, but as an active, alive, and accommodating dimension. The Myth of the Inner Manager: A critique of the reflexive, modern impulse to over-manage every facet of our internal lives, and how to cultivate a state of un-management. Digital Colonization: Confronting the psycho-physical compression, social comparisons, and anxiety induced by modern screens, and how the acceleration of time flattens our capacity for deep meaning. The Playfulness of Inquiry: Why true contemplative practice thrives on curiosity, experimentation, and humour rather than rigid, sombre discipline. "Space is not a thing. It is what permits experience to be experienced at all. When we realize space is projecting space into space, our rigid focal settings begin to thaw." — Ronald E. Purser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 17m

  3. Apr 7

    Just Stare at the Damn Wall!

    Welcome to the Imperfect Buddha Podcast on the New Books Network. Today, we’re stripping away the incense and serenity to look at the cold, hard wall of practice. We are joined by Mark Shinji Blacknell, author of Just Stare at the Damn Wall!. Mark isn't your typical "mindfulness guru"—he’s been a Marine, a bus driver, and an alcoholic, bringing a crude and down to Earth view of enlightenment to Zen. In this episode, we dig into the friction between Mark’s focus on simple biology and the Soto establishment he knows all too well. We’ll be asking: The Technology of the Wall: In an era of bio-hacking and apps, why choose a directive as primitive as staring at a wall? The Myth of Enlightenment: Why does Mark tell his readers to "forget enlightenment" and embrace being a "doctor of nothing"? The Shadow Side: We discuss whether "McMindfulness" ignores how meditation can make unstable people more dangerous. Raw Acceptance vs. Nihilism: How do we differentiate "accepting life as it is" from a passive, terrifying nihilism? The End of the Path: If the goal is "doing nothing for nothing," how do we even know we’re practicing? From meditating with prisoners on death row to the often dirty and frustrating reality of being a practitioner, Mark joins us to explain why the only way to fail a practice is to stop: the rest is all part of the process. Is this book just a very long way of telling us to shut up? Let’s find out. Host’s webpage: here Mark Blacknell: here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 10m

  4. 12/13/2025

    Dr. Michael Uebel on Reimaging Equanimity

    Michael Uebel is a psychotherapist and researcher currently based in Austin, Texas. He is recognized as a pioneer in applying psychological insights to the historical intersections of social, personal, and imaginative phenomena. He is a Research Affiliate at the University of Texas at Austin and a psychotherapist in both the public sector and in private practice. Uebel has taught literature and critical theory at several universities, including the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and the University of Kentucky. Seeds of Equanimity: Knowing and Being (Mimesis, 2025), is an innovative introduction to the philosophy and psychology of equanimity. Uebel challenges the popular modern view often associated with certain mindfulness practices that equanimity is a state of impartial quiescence, solidity, or inner stillness, achieved through emotional regulation. His book reanimates the concept of equanimity by drawing on its philosophical and psychological genealogy by tracing its origins and development, framing it as a dynamic, active, and flexible existential condition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    46 min

  5. 07/29/2025

    Alexander Douglas, "Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self" (Random House, 2025)

    In Against Identity, philosopher Alexander Douglas seeks an alternative wisdom. Searching the work of three thinkers – ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, Dutch Enlightenment thinker Benedict de Spinoza, and 20th Century French theorist René Girard – he explores how identity can be a spiritual violence that leads us away from truth. Through their worlds and radically different cultures, we discover how, at moments of historical rupture, our hunger for being grows: and yet, it is exactly these times when we should make peace with our indeterminacy and discover the freedom of escaping our selves. Alexander Douglas was born in Canberra, Australia where he studied music and philosophy. He now teaches the history of philosophy and the philosophy of economics at the University of St Andrews. He has published two books on the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza and one on the philosophy of debt. He has grown increasingly interested in combining ideas from Western and East Asian philosophy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 9m

  6. 06/08/2025

    Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason

    Tom joins us to discuss his book Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloomsbury, 2023). Western philosophy has often claimed for itself not just a distinct sphere of knowledge, but a distinct form of communication, set against ordinary speech. For some philosophers, authentic philosophizing demands a specific manner of speaking or writing, adoption of which enables one to gesture toward truths that propositional speech will never grasp. Drawing on a variety of thinkers – Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, Fichte, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Weil, Foucault, and Irigaray – Sutherland argues this emphasis on the form of philosophical communication can function as an exclusionary mechanism, determining who is deemed capable of speaking philosophically. We discuss Plato, Nietzsche, Weil, Laruelle and applied philosophy in Hadot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    54 min

  7. 05/21/2025

    Anne C. Klein on Becoming a Buddha & Being Human too

    You’re human, but are you also a Buddha? If so, which one comes first? What does it mean to be human? What is a Buddha exactly? Is our humanity lost or superseded if we become a Buddha? Such questions might interest our more philosophical listeners. Being Human and a Buddha Too (Wisdom Publications, 2023) by today’s guest Anne Klein explores the 7-point mind training of Longchenpa, a 14th century Tibetan Scholar and Yogi from the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Anne is professor of religion at Rice University, a co-founder of the Dawn Mountain centre for Tibetan Buddhism in Housten, Texas, and a lama in the Nyingma tradition herself. Her key research areas are Tibet and Indian epistemology, Tibetan texts and language. We touch on the following themes and questions; How do you manage the dual roles of university academic and Nyingma Lama? Buddhism in the West has gone through a lot and very quickly since its more prominent emergence in the 1960s. Do you have any thoughts on Buddhism’s future in the west and whether it will maintain any significant presence once its key teachers from the boomer generation begin to pass away? Whether its problematic teachers, or, and perhaps more importantly, the insistence on a model that it antithetical to western modes of teacher student interaction, the Tibetan Lama, guru and core figure cannot escape a compatibility issue with Western norms. Worse for some still, there is also an increasing lack of teacher availability for those willing to embrace this model. Thoughts? What are we to do with language and the hermeneutic challenges its presents for translators of old Tibetan texts? Why this book? Why now? You have a series of events coming up, including retreats with translators in Germany, Switzerland and in Italy. Can you tell us about that and how listeners can get involved if they wish to? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 26m

  8. 03/22/2025

    121 Peter Sloterdijk Knows it All

    Today’s guest is Dr Thomas Sutherland, author of the Bloomsbury title, Speaking Philosophically: Communication at the Limits of Discursive Reason (Bloombury, 2024), lecturer in digital media at the University of Southampton, and researcher into digital culture and the humanities, the history of philosophy and contemporary continental philosophy, and technologies of the self. We discuss three areas that concern the odd character that is Peter Sloterdijk; namely, spheres, the practising life and his rehabilitation of philosophy as wisdom. Dr Thomas Sutherland is a deep dabbler in Sloterdijk’s thought, having written various papers on his work, including Peter Sloterdijk and the ‘security architecture of existence’: immunity, autochthony, and ontological nativism, and Ontological co-belonging in Peter Sloterdijk's spherological philosophy of mediation. He is also familiar with a regular mention here on the podcast, François Laruelle and his non-philosophy. We touch on; Sloterdijk’s original work on Cynicism and why it is still relevant today Spheres, co-existence & interdependence The Practising Life & why ‘You Must Change your Life’ The Art of Philosophy as Wisdom The strengths and weaknesses of Sloterdijk’s insights Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

    1h 9m
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Ratings & Reviews

4.9
out of 5
8 Ratings

About

The Imperfect Buddha podcast has been addressing anti-intellectualism and ideological capture in western Buddhism and spirituality more broadly since its inception. It provides a space for dynamic conversations designed to bring out what is so often hidden and so often despised by critics and intellectuals engaging with contemporary forms of practice. Matthew O’Connell hosts the Imperfect Buddha podcast and writes at The Imperfect Buddha site. Email: imperfectbuddha@outlook.com. Twitter: @imperfectbuddha. Facebook: @imperfectbuddha. Original street art Buddha image by Bristol's Banksy.

Information

  • Creator
    The Imperfect Buddha Podcast
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    128
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Matthew O’Connell
  • Show Website
    The Imperfect Buddha Podcast

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