The Buddha Sat Right Here

I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes at first. Another white Westerner ‘finding themselves’ in India? But *The Buddha Sat Right Here* disarms you immediately—Moes isn’t here to perform wisdom. She’s here to document the glorious, frustrating act of *trying*. The audiobook’s strength lies in its pacing: Douglass delivers the manic energy of a family meltdown in Varanasi with the same urgency as a quiet moment in Dharamsala, making the spiritual and the mundane feel equally vital. Her timing is impeccable, especially during the book’s funniest scenes (a tantrum in a sacred cave, a monk’s baffled reaction to a child’s fart joke) where her deadpan delivery had me laughing out loud. That said, the middle act drags slightly—Moes’s philosophical musings, while earnest, occasionally meander into abstraction, and Douglass’s soothing tone can’t always salvage the slower stretches. And while the family dynamic is compelling, her husband often feels underdeveloped, more a foil than a fully realized character. But these are minor quibbles. What lingers is the audiobook’s *texture*: the sound of prayer flags snapping in the wind, the exhaustion in Moes’s voice as she admits she’s not sure she even *likes* Buddhism, the way Douglass makes you hear the unspoken—like the sigh of a mother who’s just realized her quest for enlightenment might be derailed by a missing stuffed animal. It’s a spiritual memoir for people who don’t trust spiritual memoirs, and that’s why it works.