I don’t think many authors can say that an obscure Greek philosopher from 2,500 years ago ruined the plan for their book. 

That’s exactly what happened to me. Luckily, he also provided me with a new plan.

I was well on my way into writing about the classics of Western philosophy from the point of view of Vajrayana Buddhism. I was going to look at Buddhism and Western philosophy without making historical connections between these two traditions. I wanted to compare the view of mind from the Dzogchen teachings to the discoveries made by Plato, Descartes, Heidegger and others. My plan was to look at this relationship on the level of experiences, perceptions and ideas. Did they understand anything recognizable about the structure of the dualistic mind and maybe even glimpse that which is the base of the thinking mind? My reasoning was that is could be possible, since the view of Dzogchen is natural. It pertains in Finland in the 21st century, in Germany in the 18th century, as well as Greece in the fourth century BCE. 

But then I found Pyrrho of Elis (360–270 BCE), quite possibly the first European Buddhist. Pyrrho revealed to me a whole new path through the history of Western philosophy. As a young artist Pyrrho traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaign across Persia, all the way to ancient India. In the kingdom of Gandhara, Pyrrho encountered, according to Greek sources, “naked wise men.” For a year-and-a-half, he studied and practiced with them. After he returned, he had changed profoundly and adopted a noble philosophy. 

Several scholars have put forward the theory that these yogis he found were Buddhists. I became excited and read all that I found written about this connection. From the point of view of the Dzogchen tradition, I was able to argue for the Buddhist core of Pyrrho’s teaching in ways that had not been done before in the research literature.

Pyrrho was the main influence for the philosophical tradition of skepticism. As I kept rereading the history of philosophy, I made a striking discovery. Skepticism played a key part in the works and subsequent philosophical revolutions of Descartes in the 17th century and Husserl in the 20th century. They, in turn, influenced other important philosophers. It was a revelation to discover that these were exactly the classics I had already chosen for my book, prior to my discovery of Pyrrho.

To say that it was exciting is a severe understatement. I had found a historical thread through Western philosophy from Pyrrho to Derrida, all connected by Pyrrho’s Buddhist legacy. 

Of course, this had to be the story of my book. I had to start again.

The essence of the story of philosophy I was writing can be summarized by a line from Spectrum of Ecstasy, a book by my lamas, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen: ”something apart from thinking need to look at thinking.” (Spectrum of Ecstasy, 38) This insight leads beyond philosophy.

After more than a decade of work, the book recently came out from a major publisher in Finland. In Finnish the title is Kirje Buddhalta – länsimaisen filosofian buddhalainen historia. In English it reads A Letter from the Buddha: A Buddhist History of Western Philosophy. It is big, something of a life’s work. It grew out of a decades-long relationship with the history of thought. In the 1990s, I studied Western philosophy at the University of Helsinki. By 1998, I realized that I had come to a philosophical position which I understood to be religious. I saw that paradox was fundamental to the human experience.

I realized that the transformation of the human being lay beyond the thinking process—which is what philosophy is. I began to practice Vajrayana Buddhism, in the Aro gTér lineage, a yogic tradition that holds the point of view of Dzogchen. I left Western philosophy behind.

After 12 years of studying and practicing Buddhism, I picked up philosophy books again. I was excited to discover that some contemporary philosophers wrote about Buddhism. The excitement soon turned to disappointment, when I realized that what they wrote was either quite shallow or sometimes based on misunderstanding even the basics of Buddhism. They had probably read the wrong books.

I also read many excellent works which compared Western philosophy with some of the philosophical schools of Buddhism. These books tended to be quite academic. This is understandable, when one complex philosophical system is presented next to another complex conceptual system. 

It began to dawn on me that there was a gap. Something was missing from the encounter between these two traditions. I had the sense that the books I read, great and interesting though they were, weren’t talking about the main thing. The books were not about that which I had learned through my Buddhist training with my lamas Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen to be essential. They did not speak of form and emptiness and the spacious mind in which they are inseparable. They did not explain referentiality, and how our habit of manufacturing reference points is our central problem, the error we make which prevents us from recognizing Nature of Mind. I wanted to find what was real in personal experience and reflection. I wanted to find something that was alive and inspiring, what felt real in the senses. In short, I did not find a work in which the complexity of Western philosophy was looked at from the experiential point of view of the yogic tradition of Vajrayana and the simple yet profound view of Dzogchen. 

That was the gap. I decided to try and breach it. 

I read the classics of philosophy, from Plato to Descartes, from Hume to Heidegger, from the point of view of Vajrayana. Pyrrho’s method, which for me was the basic Buddhist method expressed in the language of Hellenistic philosophy, was the practical interface between the two traditions. 

The results were encouraging. I spent years on an exciting journey of discovery. I looked at René Descartes, whose famous cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” is a phrase that practically everyone has heard. Yet it is almost the antithesis of a foundational teaching of Buddhism, that the self is an illusory construction, a verb which mistakes itself to be a noun. Through my reading, I found a more interesting way to understand him in a Buddhist context. 

Another fascinating example is David Hume, who refutes Descartes’s notion of self and criticizes our psychological notion of causality. Reading him, I realized that he deals with the key teaching topics of Sutric Buddhism. Immanuel Kant’s main discovery was to see how profoundly we structure our experience. I realized that this understanding really opened the Western philosophical tradition’s door to Buddhism. Reality is always structured by our perception.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there was the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida, the closest that Western thought has ever come to the Buddhist view, in my opinion. To put it in simple terms, phenomenology is the study of how phenomena manifest in mind. The philosophers of the Kyoto school in Japan saw the relationship between phenomenology and Buddhism already in the 20th century, while Heidegger was still alive.

My exploration was heavily inspired by my favorite philosopher, Jacques Derrida. According to him, in all our communication and experience, and particularly in philosophy which tries to write about the nature of experience, there is always something “other” that can never really be articulated, yet which is fundamental to all our experience and articulation. It paradoxically makes articulation possible but cannot itself be articulated. Derrida reads traces of this in the history of philosophy. 

I realized that this has a striking analogy to the view of Dzogchen. According to Dzogchen, our non-dual nature is present in every instant of experience. It is the nature of all experience. We could recognize it in every moment. But it is too much, too close, too subtle, too overwhelming. We turn away from it and rather choose our limitations. As my lamas Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen write in an article for Buddhistdoor Global, paradoxically, our essential nature is most other to us: “From the point of view of duality, nothing is as ‘other’ or dissimilar as non-duality.”

We avoid it and actively discriminate against it as we want to separate from it. 

The analogy was a revelation. Spacious mind could not fit into any philosophical system, but traces of it could maybe be discovered. Sometimes it felt as if the Buddhist view could be glimpsed between the lines of the classics, when they wrote about mind, thought, experience, perception, and ultimately of life and of death. It was as if the were cracks through which the view was shining through. 

From the walls of Plato’s cave to Heidegger’s Being and finally to Derrida’s deconstruction, what I glimpsed, was spaciousness. After 14 years, I have finally written it into 756 pages of text in Finnish.

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