Episode 178: Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote began a career in film at 39, after living nearly a dozen years in the counterculture during the 1960s and 70s. Since then, he has performed as an actor for some of the world’s most distinguished filmmakers, including Barry Levinson, Roman Polanski, Pedro Almodovar, Steven Spielberg, Walter Hill, Martin Ritt, Steven Soderberg, Diane Kurys, Sidney Pollack and Jean Paul Rappeneau. To date he has made over 150 films.
Mr. Coyote has written a memoir of his counterculture years called Sleeping Where I Fall which received universally excellent reviews, appeared on three best-seller lists and sold five printings in hardback after being released by Counterpoint Press in 1999. In 2011 he was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest and in 2015 received “transmission” from his teacher, making him an independent Zen teacher.
His 2024 book is an engaging guide to Zen Buddhism, and it helps us peer beneath the Japanese gift-wrapping of Zen teachings to reveal the fundamental teachings of the Buddha and show how they can be applied to contemporary daily life. Peter explains that the majority of Western Buddhists are secular and many don’t meditate, wear robes, shave their heads, or believe in reincarnation. He reminds us that the mental/physical states achieved by Buddhist practice are universal human states, ones we may already be familiar with but perhaps never considered as possessing spiritual dimensions.
Exploring Buddha’s core teachings, Peter shares his own secular and accessible interpretations of the Four Noble Truths, the Three Treasures, and the Eightfold Path within the context of his lineage and the teachings of his teacher and the teachers before him. He looks at Buddha’s teachings on our singular reality that appears as a multiplicity of things and on the “self” that perceives reality, translating powerful spiritual experience into the vernacular of modern life.
Revealing the practical usefulness of Buddhist philosophy and practice, Zen in the Vernacular: Things as it Is shows how Zen offers a creative problem-solving mechanism and moral guide ideal for the stresses and problems of everyday life.