Michael Schauch - Anattā, Heart of Wisdom

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Michael Schauch spent decades as an investment-portfolio manager in British Columbia before the mountains rearranged his priorities. An award-winning author, alpinist, and lifelong Buddhist practitioner, he has carried a quiet fascination with impermanence across a career spent scaling some of the most remote terrain on earth — not one range, but a life built peak by peak, each ascent stripping something further away until what remained felt closer to essential.

That stripping-away is the subject of his new book, Anattā: Heart of Wisdom — eight essays and poems moving between sky caves lined in crystal, villages perched at Himalayan altitude, and the more ordinary warmth of a campfire in his own backyard. Schauch takes anattā, the Buddhist teaching of non-self, and turns it away from doctrine and toward something closer to intimacy: the idea that the conflicts we carry with others begin, always, as conflicts we haven't yet resolved within. Readers have likened his voice to Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chödrön — plainspoken, often funny, never solemn for its own sake — and the book itself has drawn comparisons to Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard for the way it lets landscape do the teaching.

He joins us on Seekers and Finders to talk about what the mountains actually gave him, and what got left behind on the way down.

michaelschauch.com