Shantideva on Bodhisattvadom 101
Those who will falsely accuse me, and others who will do me harm, and others still who will degrade me, may they all share in Awakening. I am the protector of the unprotected and the…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Be In Love with This Life: A Class with Cami Kasmerchak and Mark Chmiel
One September evening, a group of Weston students walked past a disfigured man in a wheel-chair begging outside the school. No one said hello or even acknowledged him, which prompted Gene later to ask aloud…
The Patron Saint of All Outsiders
This French version of Kafka, this cross between Pascal and Orwell remains unclassifiable. She is intellectually stateless, prophet without any country in which she can be sure of honor. A Catholic Jewess who criticized impeccably…
Arundhati Roy on How MLK Is Remembered
Martin Luther King Jr. made the forbidden connections between Capitalism, Imperialism, Racism and the Vietnam War. As a result, after he was assassinated even his memory became toxic, a threat to public order. Foundations and…
Unodious Comparisons
Make the most and best of your lot, and compare yourself not with the few that are above you, but with the multitudes which are below you. –Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of…
Closer than Your Jugular Vein
“Look not for my reality in the realm of appearances or in the Void. Seek it in your own mind. There only it resides.–Kuan Yin, in John Blofeld, Bodhisattva of Compassion: The Mystical Tradition of…
Look on the Bright Side
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. –Oscar Wilde, quoted in Christopher Isherwood, Ramakrishna and His Disciples
Present Moment Only Moment
Harold: This is real nice. Makes me want to do somersaults.Maude: Well, why don’t you?Harold: I’d feel stupid.Maude: Harold, everyone has the right to make an ass out of themselves.You just can’t let the world…
A Carpe Diem Reminder
The certainty that life cannot be long, and the probability that it will be much shorter than nature allows, ought to awaken every man to the active prosecution of whatever he is desirous to perform….
The Business of Wisdom & Virtue
But our ideas are more subjected to choice; we can call them before us, and command their stay, we can facilitate and promote their recurrence, we can either repress their intrusion, or hasten their retreat….