Is “comedian’s comedian” Garry Shandling a Buddhist? Well, as Amy Wallace writes in her new profile of the comedian for GQ magazine, he “stops short” of labeling himself that way, but is “a serious student of dharma.” Whether you’re a serious student of dharma or just of comedy, you won’t want to miss the profile, found in the August 2010 GQ.

Shandling’s connection to dharma and mindfulness practice has been discussed before, but mostly in subtle terms — and with Shandling at the controls. The special features for a DVD set of the best from his hilarious HBO program The Larry Sanders Show — all of whose episodes will see a full release this September — do help to bring the connection to light, via tender and funny cameos from (for example) Sharon Stone, Tom Petty, and monk Hann Nguyen.

For better or worse, many of us have got our favorite dharma books and trinkets. Well, I count the four-disc Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show DVD-set as one of them. Why?

Surprised that a box set of DVDs could be as dear to me as, say, an inscribed book from a teacher or the Manjushri statue that a dear friend gave me (and which is watching me from its perch next to my monitor)? That makes two of us. But hear me out.

For those who don’t know: The Larry Sanders Show was one of the funniest, smartest shows ever on TV, period. (You only have to Google to see how widely-shared that opinion is.) The brainchild of the genius comedian Garry Shandling, Larry was a send-up of late-night TV, tracking the life and death of a Tonight-style show and its host, the neurotic but lovable — and very funny — Larry Sanders. But Larry and his staff of competitive LA producers, handlers, and lackeys were, above all, human. All that neurosis and competition make for some cringe-worthy comedy, sure. But there’s a lot of innocence to it all somehow. And once you’ve finished watching the final episode (the last of 23 included in the set) you just might be a little choked up. These fictional — and, again, very funny — people are somehow very real.

That’s by design. Authenticity — being true to the way people actually think, act, and treat each other — plays a major role in the show. “It’s like taking a Buddhist temple bell,” Shandling says, “an authentic, two-thousand year old Buddhist temple bell, and ringing it and going, ‘Can you tell me why that rings so purely?’ [It’s] because it’s the real thing.”

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“All these people in show business are human beings,” Shandling says.

Shandling, it turns out, is all about The Real Thing. The comedian started the show to, in his words, “discover more, Who am I?” (Director Todd Holland backs this up, saying that “Garry’s obsession is to truly expose the truth about himself.”)

All of this is in line with what might be a surprising element of Shandling’s psychological makeup. He’s not just some whiny comedian. He’s a searcher, on a journey to find The Real Thing, and the Real Garry Shandling, in what might seem one of the most unlikely places — Hollywood.

It’s in the DVD’s extras that you’ll find the most enlightening moments about the key player on both sides of the camera: in candid visits with his guest-star friends, Shandling reveals an appealingly meditative side. A longtime mindfulness practitioner in Thich Nhat Hanh’s tradition, the comedian used these get-togethers not just to catch up with the people he loves, but to make that love plain.

He’s humble when it comes to talking about his practice — it’s not “Hey, look at me.” It’s “Hey, can you help me look at myself?” On Disc One, in talking to former flame Sharon Stone, he offers that he’s keeping up his practice, just before telling her how important she remains to him. On Disc Four, he shows his friend and neighbor Tom Petty his previously private dharma-tattoo, an enso (or “Zen circle”) inked onto the back of the comedian’s neck to remind him of his work towards, as he says, “ego-emptiness.” And while Shandling laments the camera’s presence at least a couple of times, it’s also clear that he’s trying to be open, to be willing to say and hear things about himself — no matter how intimate. By most accounts, including his own, this is new. His practice is becoming truly integrated with his life.

There are a couple more outward indicators of the dharma’s influence in Shandling’s life strewn throughout the discs. For example, in a reunion in his real-life living room with the show’s two comedic iron-men — Rip Torn, who played Arthur, Larry’s producer and protector; and Jeffrey Tambor, who, as Sanders’s on-screen sidekick Hank Kingsley, brought the nonsensical catchphrase “Hey now!” into the pop-culture vernacular — we catch a glimpse of Buddhist prayer flags. But it’s in the reflective words of the cast and crew that we get a more concrete sense of how Garry’s drive to get at The Real Thing informs not only his life, but those around them. Tambor, for example, captures this in describing how he was able to make his performance as Hank ring true, no matter how outrageous the scene. When he reveals that “the secret to everything [is,] don’t think,” it’s not a big leap to infer that he’s probably learned how to do this from his friend Garry.

The DVD’s capping phrase comes in its final extra, a short visit with the monk Hann Nguyen, titled “The Journey Continues.” “The true [only] enemy,” as Nguyen tells Garry, “is ignorance.” Then, the screen quickly fades to black. It’s hardly the “last word” that you might expect from a retrospective of one of TV’s most notoriously snarky comedies.

But then, as Garry Shandling clearly knows: if you’ve got a sense of humor, you can find dharma just about anywhere. It’ll be great to see what extras/surprises are in store in this September’s DVD release of every Larry episode.