There has been a deluge of remembrances of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, who passed away yesterday, January 10th, 2026. Forgive me for my own indulgence.
It might strike some as odd for a publisher known for sober, traditional books on how to transform our minds and our world to pay tribute to someone who might, to some, seem to represent a more hedonistic strain of American culture. But that would be off the mark.
Weir had the reputation of being the nearest the Grateful Dead had to a showman. That is relative - the closest to rock and roll swagger from these guys that would elicit cheers from the audience was one of the musicians bending down to grab a fallen guitar pick.
When I was a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Ram Dass came to my class to give a talk and effused that Bob was utterly unassuming and humble and that who he was, as a person, completely unlike his stage presence.
I never met Bob, though he supplied me with backstage passes for a show at the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in the 1980s thanks to a mutual friend. And I bumped into him once at a teaching by the Dalai Lama some years later. But I saw him play well over 100 times in the 80s and 90s, and while I abandoned the sacraments and became less interested in the scene and the evolving sound after 1995, the music he and his brother musical marauders made, particularly in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, has in many ways been the soundtrack of my life.
For me, it is still about the music. But there is more to it than that. A lot more. I can trace my path to immersing myself in and, later, embracing the teachings of Buddhism directly to the period in my life when I was surrounded by the music of the Dead and the creativity and curiosity it sparked within so many of us.
The world of the Grateful Dead was a swirling, multifaceted force that inspired a generation of us to go out on the road and explore our country, to ask what this world was all about, and what our minds might be capable of. And grow up.
It was the many cross-country road trips to see shows, driving through landscapes that opened the mind.
It was the grizzled guy sipping a porter at the Santa Cruz Brewing Company telling me about the band’s fascination with the Daoist text The Secret of the Golden Flower (I still have no idea if this is true).
It was a friend in Bodhgaya, the site of the Buddha’s Enlightenment, telling me about her time with the band during the famed Egypt tour of 1978.
And, more than anything, it was the ethos of the whole scene that somehow encouraged so many of us to question what matters, what is real, and what we might do on this bright blue ball spinning free.
I know so many people who came to a committed spiritual practice out of the milieu of the Grateful Dead and its music. In the Buddhist world, I know teachers, translators, and many practitioners who were deeply influenced by their experiences and, indeed, relationship with this band.
We publish one of the great works by Longchenpa, a commentary on the Kunjey Gyalpo Tantra, called The Jewel Ship: A Guide to the Meaning of Pure and Total Presence, the Creative Energy of the Universe.
The translators titled the book You Are the Eyes of the World after the Grateful Dead song Eyes of the World and included the song’s lyrical bridge as the opening epigraph:
Wake up to find out that
you are the eyes of the world,
Waken now, discover that you are the song
that the mom-in' brings
This is not to say that the songs or band members were espousing any religious sensibility or they themselves were worthy of veneration in any way. Far from it. Rather, the garden they tended allowed so many of us bees to discover some nectar and fly up, up, and away.
When I look around now, I have a sense of loss and that nothing I can see exists now for young people to inspire them in the very unique and irreplicable way Garcia, Weir, Hunter, Barlow, Lesh, Mydland, Kreutzman, and Hart—perhaps inadvertantly—did for me and so many others. The world in many ways seems a bleaker place now.
But as Robert Hunter, one of the songwriters for the Dead, said when discussing a magical day in London when three of the greatest songs he wrote poured out of him after half a bottle of Retsina, “would those days, they come again….oh, they will! they will! But not for me.”
It will look different for another generation, but it will come if it is not already here and I just am blind to it. And I do hope whatever those forces might be that turn people in the direction I was turned, coalesce and fill the air with song.
Thank you, Bob, for shining that lovelight.
Nikko Odiseos
Here is a small taste of Bob playing.