The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet Buddha

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet Buddha reveals how to use masks, meditation, and improvisation to free yourself from overthinking, self-doubt, and fixed ideas of who you think you are.

It shares a series of mindfulness techniques and improv exercises with masks to suppress the ego, calm the mind, and allow spontaneous playfulness and spaciousness to arise from your deepest nature. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, it describes how and why these exercises work. The narrative is woven throughout with a lighthearted parable of an overweight and out-of-work Lone Ranger and Tonto who meet Buddha and experience spiritual awakening.

Award-winning actor, narrator, and Zen Buddhist priest, Peter Coyote, offers a series of mindfulness techniques and acting exercises that demonstrate the malleability of the self. Coyote reveals how to use masks, meditation, and improvisation to help you release your ego from constant defensive strategizing, calm the mind’s overactivity, and allow spontaneous playfulness to arise from your deepest nature.

Developed through 40 years of research and personal study, Coyote’s synthesis of mask-based improv games and Zen practices is designed to create an ego-suppressed state akin to the mystical experiences of meditation or the spiritual awakenings of psychedelics. After preparatory exercises, seeing yourself in a mask temporarily displaces your familiar self, allowing the spirit of the mask to take over.

Likening the liberated state induced by mask work to “Enlightenment-lite,” Coyote draws on Buddhist philosophy to describe how and why the exercises work, as well as how to integrate your newly awakened and confident self into daily life. In true Zen form, the transformation of the Lone Ranger mirrors that of the individual pursuing this practice, revealing how you will come to realize that the world is more magical and vaster than you thought possible.