Powered by RND
PodcastsReligion & SpiritualityThe Man Who Woke up the Buddha

The Man Who Woke up the Buddha

David Blistein
The Man Who Woke up the Buddha
Latest episode

Available Episodes

5 of 33
  • S2/Ep. 1: Sid Gets His Ducks in a Row. (podcast)
    Welcome to the first episode of Season Two, in which Sid continues to deconstruct traditional spiritual assumptions—and, at times, everyday common sense—as he waits at the duck pond for Di to pick him up to go to his second surgery. Click here to read this episode.Return to Podcast Episode #1. Get full access to Fields of Vision at davidblistein.substack.com/subscribe
    --------  
    6:08
  • The Bugs Bunny Sutra (Redux)
    This is the last summer re-run before we return to The Man Who Woke up the Buddha—the ongoing (mis)adventures of an ordinary businessman named Sid, who has realized that he is the Buddha, and the Buddha, who has realized he has to find a way to manifest his evolving truth in this, his latest and strangest incarnation. With all due respect to Sid and the Buddha, the following post is easily the most spiritual, esoteric, wise, profound, and irreverent as anything I’ve had the honor of writing. I owe much of my early education in the questionable arts of double entendre, timing, alliteration, dramatic tension, bad puns, and instant karma to a man named Chuck Jones and his collaborators.Did I say timing?Chuck (I don’t think he’d mind if I call him “Chuck”) is best known for channeling Bugs Bunny and many of his Loony Tunes cohorts. Bugs is a “bodhisattva”—a perfectly evolved being who has returned in earthly form to help guide others to completion. He shares his wisdom freely: “Don’t take life too seriously. You’ll never get out alive!” and has nothing but a mildly bemused love for the creatures he encounters. Even when the infamous Elmer Fudd trains a shotgun on Bug’s face, our hero responds with calm aplomb. And when the other shoe drops—typically in the form of something like a ten-pound anvil on Elmer’s head—Bugs uses it as a teaching moment to illustrate the eternal, and yet unnecessary, suffering of humans who live from anger and fear.Despite this sage instruction, Mr. Fudd seems incapable of being free of judgment, frequently accusing his adversary of being just a “silly wabbit.” Whereas Bugs, even in the face of overwhelming firepower, maintains his cool detachment and says, with as much compassion as flippancy, “Remember Doc! Keep smiling!” While you could argue that Bugs strays from at least one of the eightfold paths when he gloats, “Of course, I talk to myself. Because sometimes I need expert advice,” to him it’s just a statement of fact that proceeds, albeit counter-intuitively, from his other seminal insight: “Y’know, maybe there is no intelligent life out there in the universe after all.”Chuck Jones once said: “Bugs is who we want to be. Daffy is who we are.” Personally, I’d rather be Road Runner: that inscrutable master of the Tao, perfectly enlightened Zen Master, and animated incarnation of the Dalai Lama. RR (I don't think they'd mind me calling them "RR") finds a myriad of ways to instruct Wile E. Coyote in the laws of instant karma, without saying a word (beep beep) or lifting a finger (they don't have fingers).Road Runner also gives the classic Greek philosophers a monosyllabic run for their money. In one version of a recurring shtick, Wile E. Coyote paints a tunnel opening on a huge boulder, figuring that Road Runner will go splat!!! Instead, the galloping guru of the desert runs right through it. Baffled, Wile E. tries it himself, and, sure enough, he too can walk right into the tunnel. But when he turns around he finds he can’t get out. Top that, Plato.It was somehow reassuring when I brought up the name Chuck Jones to my autodidact illustrator Echo, as we talked about the art for this essay. Since Echo is a disturbing number of decades younger than me—and Chuck Jones died around the time they were born—I assumed Echo would never have heard of him. Instead, their face immediately lit up: “Chuck Jones was a genius,” Echo said, before elaborating on Chuck's influence on the art of illustration.But what about voice? Would my voice be all that different if I was growing up today?The other evening I was assaulted by ads for Thor: Love & Thunder during halftime of a basketball game. On the surface, its characters seem a world—or a universe—apart from Bugs et. al. When I was a kid, the goal was to anthropomorphize animated characters. Now, it seems, the goal is to animate human characters. But both rely on the same combination of gratuitous violence and irreverent humor. And Bugs could break the fourth wall with the best of them.Well, only a fool and/or epistemologist would try to determine which aspects of a writer’s voice come from nurture and which come from nature. Ars may be longa, but the life of a writing style can be pretty brevis. Fortunately, Chuck Jones dissolved the distinction:"The rules are simple. Take your work, but never yourself, seriously. Pour in the love and whatever skill you have, and it will come out." — Chuck Jones Get full access to Fields of Vision at davidblistein.substack.com/subscribe
    --------  
    5:06
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Neurotransmitters. (Redux)
    This piece is based on a chapter of a book I wrote called David’s Inferno that was published more than a decade ago. In addition to personal stories, it includes information about the science of mental health, prescription drugs, alternative medicine, and therapies; as well as reflections on depression’s impact on relationships, spirituality, and creativity—which is the subject of this essay. Get full access to Fields of Vision at davidblistein.substack.com/subscribe
    --------  
    7:03
  • Swoopers, Bashers, & Leaf Rakers. (Redux)
    Kurt Vonnegut said there are two types of writers: Swoopers, who dive in, get it all down, and then go back and painstakingly fix whatever doesn’t work; and Bashers, who go slowly, trying to get it right, one sentence at a time.I’ve worked both ways. But, for longer pieces, I’m primarily a Leaf Raker—from the research phase to the final draft.I discovered this when we lived in a house in the country with two large fields. One was so rocky it barely needed mowing. The other was larger and wide open; bordered on three sides by sugar maples, along with a few oaks and a beech or two that had snuck in while the maples weren’t looking. The maple leaves began to fall in late summer. At first, I’d just watch as they collected in little clusters under the largest trees.During one of those late summers, I began working on a large project—a documentary. My colleagues were more familiar with the subject than I was, so they began suggesting books and articles for me to read and sharing their preliminary ideas for the script. I’d listen, print out key emails and documents, pick up random books, read a few pages, and jot notes on the pads scattered around my office. After a few weeks, however, it was time to get serious. (I.e., I got a signed contract.)The key to raking a large area is to create small piles and rake them together into increasingly larger piles. It sounds simple but there’s some strategy involved—where to place each pile on the field, how close they should be to each other, and how big they should be before starting a new one.There are many ways to organize large projects. I’ve used most of them—starting with the index cards on which I wrote notes during Junior High School and organized in a small gray metal box with carefully labeled dividers. Since then, I’ve used multi-level outlines, multi-sized index cards, and multi-colored sticky notes arranged and rearranged on walls or whiteboards. Nowadays, many people use scrawled collections of boxes, arrows, doodles, and charts called “mind maps.” They don’t work for me. I’m trying to organize all that chaos in my brain, not turn it into a work of art.Rakes come in a surprising number of sizes and materials. I prefer old-fashioned bamboo rakes. That’s what I used when I raked my parents’ lawn 50+ years ago, so they’re nostalgic as well as natural. Plastic ones are more practical—they tend to be wider but the leaves don’t come off as easily. Metal rakes are great for scratching every last leaf bit out of the grass, but that feels a little obsessively suburban. As summer turned into fall, my fellow filmmakers increasingly inundated me with ideas, suggestions, advice, books, magazine articles, and quotations. Fearful of succumbing to information overload, I hurriedly began to collect them into more targeted folders, subfolders, and files, (I use a program called Scrivener to organize projects. It’s so good, Microsoft Word should slink away in shame and take its multiple menus and obscure shortcuts along with it.)Just as I felt I was making progress, the leaves on the maples began to drop in earnest, joined now by the beeches. It was no longer enough to have a few small piles. I needed five, then six, then ten. A friend offered to lend me a leaf blower, but that seemed like a sacrilege. Another suggested I just mow them all. I tried that once. But it created a big mush of brown. Besides, I like raking.The background information kept coming, but my basic organization held together pretty well. Occasionally, something simply didn’t fit so I created a new folder or threw the information into what my colleagues call an “icebox,” which is kind of like a teenager saying they want to date other people but aren’t ready to talk about it yet. One of my favorite raking moments is when a strong puff of wind hits the leaves just right so a cluster floats up in the air and does a pirouette before falling back to earth. By late September, I began to rake all the little piles of leaves into one big pile.And, I began working on a draft of the script.One night in late October, I woke up and heard a howling north wind. By morning, my carefully sorted piles had disintegrated into one inchoate mess.As I began to write the script, I sat in on two long interviews with experts and received some preliminary feedback from colleagues, both of which made everything I’d written so far appear appear to be one big disorganized, incoherent jumble of sentences.I’ve learned not to panic at times like this. You just have to take a deep breath, pick up your rake and get back to work.The next draft can be rather grueling. But the situation may turn out to be less dire than it seemed: The general organization may not be a tear-down, just need some structural work; some of the good sentences may still work as is. By the third or fourth draft, you might even be able to do a little swooping and bashing.But you can’t get overconfident. Most of the oak leaves won’t start falling for another month and even continue, often past the first snowfall, when they’ll scatter, rust-colored, across the pristine white. Just when you thought everything was perfect. Get full access to Fields of Vision at davidblistein.substack.com/subscribe
    --------  
    6:48
  • How I Learned to Write (Redux.)
    My father Elmer—a rather odd moniker for a Jewish kid from Pawtucket, Rhode Island—taught Shakespeare at Brown University for almost 40 years. He taught me the crucial difference between what I thought my words were saying and what they actually said. In the former, writers really only listen to themselves, leaving the reader to watch from a distance as phrases and sentences careen unchallenged around the writer’s brain, trapped in self-referential loops. In the latter, the writer listens along with the readers. They may not agree. They may not even like each other. But they are at least on the same page. Get full access to Fields of Vision at davidblistein.substack.com/subscribe
    --------  
    3:43

More Religion & Spirituality podcasts

About The Man Who Woke up the Buddha

The Man Who Woke Up the Buddha is an episodic novel about the (mis)adventures of a guy named Sid who wakes up from a stroke and realizes he's the Buddha—even though he knows next to nothing about Buddhism. It tells the story of Sid’s life as he, his family, friends—and the historic Buddha himself—deal with his terminal illness and irreverent (newly-discovered) Buddha nature. davidblistein.substack.com
Podcast website

Listen to The Man Who Woke up the Buddha, The Daily Grace Podcast and many other podcasts from around the world with the radio.net app

Get the free radio.net app

  • Stations and podcasts to bookmark
  • Stream via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth
  • Supports Carplay & Android Auto
  • Many other app features

The Man Who Woke up the Buddha: Podcasts in Family

Social
v7.22.0 | © 2007-2025 radio.de GmbH
Generated: 8/2/2025 - 3:33:36 AM