“If the Unconditioned is available, and it’s the only trustworthy happiness around, the most sensible course is to invest our efforts and whatever mental and spiritual resources we have in its direction [...] The news of the Buddha’s awakening sets the standards for judging the culture we were brought up in, and not the other way around. This is not a question of choosing Asian culture over American. The Buddha’s awakening challenged many of the presuppositions of Indian culture in his day; and even in so-called Buddhist countries, the true practice of the Buddha’s teachings is always counter-cultural. It’s a question of evaluating our normal concerns— conditioned by time, space, and the limitations of aging, illness, and death— against the possibility of a timeless, spaceless, limitless happiness. All cultures are tied up in the limited, conditioned side of things, while the Buddha’s awakening points beyond all cultures. It offers the challenge of the Deathless that his contemporaries found liberating and that we, if we are willing to accept the challenge, may find liberating ourselves.”