Know Your Purpose
By refusing to distract himself from the main task, by jealously guarding his energies for what really mattered, [Arthur] Waley was able to produce his vast corpus of work. Title is a key theme in…
Category: China
Things Fall Apart
I had returned to China looking for my old country. I found an even older and more decrepit one. It called itself new and belittled everything old, such as courtesy, culture, civilization. No one under…
Honesty & Humility
There is a story that Po always showed his poems to an uneducated old servant-woman, and anything she couldn’t understand, he rewrote. –David Hinton on Po Chü-i, in The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese…
Today’s One-Liner (#4)
bi you shi yan. –Mengzi, “Always have a task” Wang understood Mengzi’s teaching of bi you shi yan as “always have a task.” One must maintain a constant vigil over one’s thoughts and ideas and…
Thus Spoke a Chinese Dissident
There is no revolution like the Communist revolution. You simply burn all the books, kill all of the thinking people and use the poor proletariat to create a very simple benchmark to gauge social change….
Open Your Eyes
Untold opportunities arise in one’s householder existence to practice sadhana. –Sri Anandamayi Ma, in Joseph Fitzgerald, The Essential Sri Anandamayi Ma: Life and Teachings of a 20th Century Indian Saint There is no time or place…
Instagram, Shminstagram
Central to the private life of the Taoist is the art of concealment. In Taoism, to conceal does not mean to be aloof and disengaged. Rather, it means not to dazzle or make ourselves the…
Go to Hell
“Keep you mind in hell, and despair not.” –Staretz Silouan, 1866-1938, quoted in Gillian Rose, Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life Ksitigarbha … made the great vow to go into the hell realm so that…
Long Live Detachment
Those who follow the path of service renounce their selfish attachments, and work with the body, senses, and mind for the sake of self-purification. The man whose consciousness is unified abandons all attachment to the…