There are people I have encountered through books whose ideas refuse to remain on the page. They disturb something. They expose an assumption I did not know I was making, give language to something I have experienced but never named, or challenge an idea I had grown too comfortable believing.
This series is about those encounters.
Conversations on the Edge is not an attempt to assemble a new spiritual canon or collect wisdom from different traditions into one comprehensive system. I have spent enough of my life inside systems that claimed to explain reality. I am not interested in constructing another one from more diverse materials. I am interested in conversation.
The people I will engage here come from different centuries, cultures, disciplines, religions, and philosophical traditions. I will not necessarily agree with them, and they would certainly not all agree with one another. Some will challenge assumptions embedded in Western culture. Others will complicate ideas at the center of my own work. Occasionally they may expose places where the language of existential health is insufficient, culturally narrow, or simply wrong.
I want to allow that to happen.
Existential health is concerned with our human relationship to meaning, mortality, identity, belonging, uncertainty, self-trust, and the experience of being alive. No single tradition owns this territory. Human beings have been wrestling with these questions for thousands of years, in monasteries and marketplaces, religious communities and philosophical schools, villages and universities, through poetry, ritual, contemplation, storytelling, scholarship, and ordinary life.
There is an enormous human conversation already underway. I want to enter it without requiring everyone I encounter to become a spokesperson for what I already believe.
That means resisting the temptation to extract useful ideas from other traditions and translate them immediately into the language of existential health. Sometimes the more important encounter happens when another way of seeing refuses translation. The difference itself becomes instructive. A foreign idea remains foreign long enough to expose the limits of my own categories.
The question guiding these essays is not simply, What can I learn from this person?
It is something more demanding:
What happens when I allow another way of understanding human existence to challenge what I think I know?
I am particularly interested in the edges because edges are where frameworks become visible. At the center of a worldview, its assumptions often feel like reality itself. At the edge, we encounter someone who begins somewhere else. What seemed obvious becomes questionable. What seemed universal becomes situated. What seemed complete develops openings.
I do not expect these conversations to end in agreement. I hope they leave something unresolved.
Perhaps that is one of the purposes of encountering another human mind across the distance of culture, history, language, and experience. We do not have to make them one of us. We do not have to become one of them. We can allow the encounter itself to enlarge the territory in which we are learning to be human.
That is where I want these conversations to happen. On the edge.
There is a sentence I have been writing in different forms for several years:
Before we explain reality, we must learn how to inhabit it.
I explored that idea more fully in an earlier article, ** Before We Explain Reality**, but the conviction behind it reaches much further back in my life.
I arrived there through a long and unlikely route, beginning in a religious world where reality came to me already interpreted. There was already a story in place when I arrived. It explained where we came from and why we were here. It told me what had gone wrong with us and what a meaningful life required. It even told me where everything was ultimately going.
Christianity, at least in the form I inhabited it, did more than give me beliefs about existence. It gave existence a structure. I knew where I stood within it and what my life meant inside the larger story. It gave me an architecture for understanding existence itself.
Leaving that world eventually confronted me with something I did not initially know how to name. Losing an explanation of reality and losing reality are not the same thing, but from inside the experience they can feel remarkably similar. When the framework through which you have understood existence begins to collapse, there is an understandable urgency to find something else capable of doing the work the old system once did.
For some people that replacement is another spiritual tradition. For others it is psychology, politics, science, philosophy, identity, or a new community organized around a different account of what is true. The content changes, but the deeper longing sometimes remains untouched. We still want something large enough to tell us what all of this means.
Much of my work in existential health has emerged from resisting that urgency. I am less interested in explanations that settle existence than in developing our capacity to inhabit what remains unsettled. Existential health requires staying in contact with reality even when our interpretations no longer provide certainty.
That question has brought me into conversation with people far outside the theological world that originally formed me. One of them is Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki (D.T. Suzuki), the Japanese Buddhist scholar and writer who became one of the most influential interpreters of Zen Buddhism to the twentieth-century West.
I do not come to Suzuki as a Buddhist, and I have no interest in extracting Zen from Buddhism and turning it into another piece of spiritual technology for Western consumption. I am interested in Suzuki because he spent much of his intellectual life circling a problem that sits near the center of my own work: the distance between our ideas about life and the experience of actually being alive.
Suzuki was born in Japan in 1870, during the extraordinary transformation of the Meiji period. Japan was modernizing rapidly, intellectual traditions from Europe and America were entering Japanese life, and Buddhist thinkers were confronting questions about how their traditions would survive and change within a new cultural world. Suzuki eventually became one of the primary figures through whom Western audiences encountered Zen.
That history complicates any easy description of him as someone who simply carried ancient Eastern wisdom into the West. Suzuki was already standing at a cultural intersection. His presentation developed in conversation with modernity and with philosophy, psychology, Romanticism, and emerging ideas about religious experience. What many readers encountered through Suzuki was both inherited and interpreted.
I find this complication useful because it interrupts one of the habits spiritual seekers in the West have developed over the last century. We sometimes imagine that wisdom from another culture reaches us untouched by history, as though Buddhism, Taoism, Hindu traditions, Indigenous wisdom, or contemplative practices arrive from some pristine territory outside interpretation. They don’t. Traditions move through human beings, and human beings inhabit particular cultures, languages, conflicts, assumptions, and moments in history.
Suzuki was no exception. Neither am I. The existential health framework I am developing emerged from my own history. It carries traces of my decades inside Christianity and my eventual departure from institutional religion. It has also been shaped by years of working with people navigating deconstruction and the loss of inherited meaning. I am not standing outside history describing the human condition from nowhere.
This recognition changes how I want to approach Suzuki. I do not need him to become an oracle or Zen to become another comprehensive system. I am more interested in what becomes visible when two different ways of approaching human existence are allowed to meet without requiring either one to swallow the other.
To understand why Suzuki cared so deeply about direct experience, we have to go further into the spiritual world he inhabited. Zen was not simply an intellectual subject for him. While studying at Tokyo Imperial University, he undertook training as a lay practitioner at Engakuji, the Rinzai monastery in Kamakura. What eventually reached Western readers through his books had roots in practice as well as scholarship.
Zen belongs to the larger Mahayana Buddhist tradition, but Suzuki was especially interested in what happens when Buddhism moves from doctrine into experience. He resisted treating it as another philosophy whose primary purpose was to provide an accurate conceptual account of reality.
Suzuki sometimes went further, provocatively insisting that the tradition was not adequately described as philosophy, religion, or even meditation. For him, its distinctive character lay in a transformation of consciousness that could not be reduced to any of those categories.
At the center of Suzuki’s understanding was satori, usually translated as awakening or enlightenment. He regarded it as pivotal to Zen religious life. Satori was not the acquisition of secret information about the universe. Nothing new had to be added. What changed was the way reality was encountered. The familiar divisions through which we organize experience could loosen, allowing what Suzuki understood as a more immediate awareness of things as they are.
This helps explain Zen’s strange relationship with language and reason. The intellect divides the world so that we can think about it. We distinguish subject from object, self from other, cause from effect, here from there. These distinctions are indispensable for ordinary life. Suzuki’s concern was that we mistake the world they create for the whole of reality. He argued that the intellect eventually reaches questions its own categories cannot resolve.
Zen developed practices intended to interrupt our habitual dependence on conceptual thought. The koan is probably the most famous. To a Western reader, a koan can initially resemble a riddle that someone has deliberately made impossible. Yet its purpose is not to reward cleverness with the correct answer. The frustration is part of the encounter. The mind keeps trying to solve through ordinary reasoning what cannot be reached through ordinary reasoning.
Suzuki’s spirituality becomes especially interesting here because Zen does not simply replace one set of religious propositions with another. Its concern is awakening within this life. The ordinary world does not have to disappear for another world to become visible. The transformation occurs in how this world is encountered.
That places enormous weight on nonduality, another idea central to Suzuki’s interpretation of Mahayana Buddhism. Nonduality does not mean that every distinction evaporates or that everything becomes an indistinguishable cosmic substance. Suzuki’s language of spirituality described an awareness in which things that appear opposed are experienced within a deeper unity while retaining their distinctiveness.
This is one reason the Buddhist understanding of the self becomes so important. Much of Western culture begins with an individual self standing over against a world. I am here; reality is there. I observe it, interpret it, act upon it, and try to determine what it means for me. Buddhism unsettles the independence of that observer. What I call the self exists through relationships, conditions, histories, bodies, language, and a world from which it was never truly separate.
Suzuki’s spirituality was not primarily concerned with perfecting an isolated interior self. Awakening changed the relationship between self and world because it exposed the inadequacy of the separation itself. His later writing connected the breaking of what he called the “ego shell” with compassion. Nonduality was not merely an altered state of consciousness. It changed how another human being could be encountered.
I discuss these ideas further in the article, ** What Becomes of the Self?: Beyond Ego, No-Self, and the Future of Human Identity**.
There is another Suzuki, however, who complicates the familiar Western image of him as simply the great spokesman for Zen. Throughout his life he also took Pure Land Buddhism, particularly Shin Buddhism, seriously. Pure Land traditions center on Amida Buddha and include the practice of nembutsu, the invocation of Amida’s name. Where Zen is often associated with jiriki, or self-power, Pure Land emphasizes tariki, other-power. Instead of awakening through one’s own striving, the practitioner encounters a form of surrender and entrustment.
For someone coming from Christianity, the language immediately sounds familiar. Grace, faith, surrender, salvation through a power beyond oneself. Suzuki explicitly resisted collapsing Shin Buddhism into Christianity, however. He interpreted Pure Land through the Buddhist logic of nonduality. Amida was not simply another version of the Christian God standing outside the human being and intervening from elsewhere.
This tension between self-power and other-power makes Suzuki more interesting to me than the simplified figure often inherited by Western spirituality. His spiritual world contained both disciplined awakening and surrender. He could write about direct realization while also taking seriously a tradition in which the exhausted self discovers the limits of its own effort.
That tension reaches directly into existential health. We need agency. Anyone who has surrendered authority to an institution or spiritual leader understands why reclaiming it is essential. Yet a life organized entirely around agency eventually reaches its limits. We do not author everything. Mortality remains beyond our control. Love comes without guarantees. Loss finds us despite our efforts, and none of us constructs a self independently of the relationships and conditions that make our lives possible.
Suzuki introduces a question more difficult than whether we should rely upon ourselves or surrender to something beyond ourselves. The question is whether the opposition itself is too small. His engagement with Zen and Pure Land suggests a spirituality in which participation involves both agency and relinquishment. We act where action belongs to us while becoming less determined to make reality submit to the sovereignty of the self.
That is much closer to what living an unmediated life needs to mean.
One of the tensions running through Suzuki’s work is the difference between conceptual knowledge and direct experience. This is sometimes flattened into the claim that Zen is anti-intellectual. Yet Suzuki spent much of his life writing, translating texts, teaching at universities, and engaging philosophical and religious ideas across cultures.
The deeper issue is not whether thought has value. It is whether thought and experience are the same thing. We know they are not, yet much of modern life encourages us to forget the difference.
Grief makes this unmistakable. A person might spend years studying bereavement, attachment, trauma, cultural mourning rituals, and the psychology of loss. That knowledge may make them a better clinician, researcher, chaplain, or friend. Then someone they love dies, and they encounter an entirely different form of knowing.
Nothing about this discovery makes the previous knowledge useless. The books were not wrong. The research did not suddenly become irrelevant. What changes is the person’s relationship to what those words were describing. Grief has moved from an object of knowledge into the fabric of their existence.
The same thing happens with love, mortality, loneliness, beauty, fear, belonging, and awe. There is always a difference between knowing about these dimensions of existence an…
