The universe runs on karma, compassion, and an alarming amount of paperwork.

Somewhere on the wheel of Samsara sits the City of a Thousand Lanterns, where enlightened beings do their level best to save all sentient life from suffering, one bureaucratic catastrophe at a time. Avalokiteśvara has a thousand arms and none of them are enough to answer his inbox. Mañjuśrī's sword of wisdom keeps getting confiscated at cosmic security checkpoints. Vajrapāṇi solves most problems by hitting them, which works less often than he'd like. And presiding over it all is the eternal, unhurried wheel of birth and death — which would run so much more smoothly if beings would just stop choosing dessert over enlightenment.

Across ten interconnected adventures, this unlikely council of bodhisattvas, Buddhas, and reformed cosmic troublemakers takes on threats no sutra ever anticipated. An afterlife running at 847 percent capacity, a self-help app that turns spiritual growth into a leaderboard, a demon workforce that's automated suffering out of the redemption business, and one very old enemy — Māra, Lord of Delusion — who has never needed a weapon when confusion works just as well.

Samsara and Other Inconveniences takes real figures from Mahayana Buddhist cosmology and drops them into problems that feel uncomfortably modern — burnout, bureaucracy, comparison, grief, the terrible temptation of shortcuts. The humor is warm rather than mocking, and the wisdom is real — every joke is built on genuine Buddhist teaching, researched and treated with care, even when the Buddha of infinite compassion is filling out a form in triplicate.

You don't need to know a single Sanskrit word to enjoy these stories. By the time you finish, you'll know several — and you might even understand why they matter.

Ten books. One wheel. Infinite inconveniences.