For the past forty years, Ken McLeod has worked as a teacher and translator of Tibetan texts, practices, and rituals. With his new book, This Unexpected Jewel: Reading the Diamond Sutra, he presents a fresh and accessible translation of the Diamond Sutra, one of the most revered texts in the Buddhist tradition.

In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with McLeod to discuss how his first encounter with the Diamond Sutra caused his mind to stop, why he frames his translation as a practitioner’s translation rather than an academic’s, how the Diamond Sutra cuts through our tendency to rely on conceptual understanding and points to a different way of experiencing life, and the transformative power of reading the sutra aloud. Plus, McLeod reads a few passages from his translation of the Diamond Sutra.