No Sky God Required: How Jazz Led Me to Buddhism and What I Found There

My Pranayama and Meditation Practice

Some people find God. Others find something more useful. This is the account of a man born into one ancient tradition who walked away from its theology but kept its hunger, and what he found when he stopped looking for permission to look.

I was born into the tribe. Not by choice. By blood, noise, argument, appetite, history that sticks to your bones and inherited neurosis. A Jew by culture, by the kind of memory that hums under your skin whether you want it or not. But religion never got a clean shot at me. No rabbi carved commandments into my spine. No synagogue wired my nervous system.

The old sky accountant could wait.

Belief bored me.

I wanted a path. Not commandments thundered from a mountain, but a road I could walk until my feet hurt. Something you test in the gut, not recite in a room of folded chairs and polite nods. No surrender of intelligence at the door.

Then a book slipped a knife between the ribs. Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha arrived as contraband and detonated quietly.

No angels. No thunder. Just recognition. The rare hit of truth you already carry but never named. Hesse pulled a stunt. His man meets the Buddha, nods with respect, then walks away. No discipleship. No secondhand salvation. No spiritual hitchhiking on someone else’s enlightenment.

That was the signal. Direct experience or nothing. No doctrine as substitute for seeing. No institution as substitute for practice. No scripture as substitute for consciousness.

Years later I drifted into the orbit of Nichiren Buddhism, dragged there by jazz. Of course jazz. The only honest religion left for people who refuse dead systems. Herbie Hancock. Wayne Shorter. People who had traveled through genius, discipline, improvisation, and inner weather, and found something in Nichiren’s teachings worth carrying.

I understood why the moment I was in the room.

New York, 1978. Backstage before a VSOP concert at Avery Fischer Hall. My friend Walter Bishop Jr. gets me in. Herbie, Wayne, Freddie Hubbard, Ron Carter, Tony Williams. Five musicians who between them had already reinvented jazz twice over, standing in a corridor that smelled like instrument cases and adrenaline, about twenty minutes from walking out in front of several thousand people. Wayne looks at me without ceremony and says, come chant. We go into his dressing room.

He moves through the Lotus Sutra as a man who has lived inside it for years. Not performing devotion. Inhabited by it. I stumble alongside him, a drunk learning a new alphabet. But something in the rhythm catches. Breath and repetition doing what argument never could. The same mechanism jazz uses. Listen. Respond. Stay awake. No passengers.

The room held all of that at once. Sacred and sweaty and completely alive.

Nichiren practice hands you one clean fact. Enlightenment is not a retirement plan. It is not waiting in the clouds with better lighting. It is here, in the mess. Bills. Bodies. Time. You earn clarity in traffic, not in heaven.

Eventually the chanting stopped. No drama. No exit wound. You walk long enough, you shed skins. Institutions build walls. Insight burns them down. I kept what worked. Dropped what didn’t.

No organization. No hierarchy. No committee guarding the gates.

Many mornings I sit in my garden in Guanajuato. High altitude. Sharp light. Birds arguing territory as minor dictators. Leaves minding their own business.

I start with breath. Pranayama. You slow it down and the mind stops acting like a busted radio. Static drops. The mud settles.

Then I sit.

No visions. No fireworks. No guru projections. Just sound. Wind. Light moving across stone. The whole world shows up and nothing needs to be fixed.

This is where the split happens. Religion wants belief. Buddhism wants proof. The Buddha made the boldest offer in the history of human thought. Don’t believe me. Test it.

That changes everything.

Watch the mind. See what creates suffering. See what reduces it. Repeat. Your life becomes the lab. Results depend on honesty.

The Four Noble Truths never felt bleak. They felt precise. There is friction. You add to it with craving and resistance. You can stop adding. There is a method.

Non-attachment gets butchered all the time. People think it means going numb. Wrong. It means you love without trying to own the thing you love. You hold life without squeezing it to death. You drop the panic.

Then you hit the real question. Consciousness. What if awareness is not a side effect. What if it is central. What if attention shapes you more than any system or belief.

Because many religions sell escape. Buddhism offers transformation.

I hold the short game and the long arc. Cause and effect. Karma as continuity. Every thought lays track. Every action builds structure. You become what you rehearse.

And impermanence. The blade. Everything moves. Everything goes. Sounds brutal until you need it. Then it saves you. Pain leaves the same way joy does. Gone.

After all these years, I don’t carry beliefs. I carry tools. Breath. Attention. Silence.

So I sit in a garden in Guanajuato, somewhere between inhale and exhale, watching the whole operation come online again. Not as theory. As fact. The mind, before the world gets its hands on it.

No sky god required.