One’s Favorite Author
I regard the discovery of one’s favorite author as the most critical event in one’s intellectual development. There is such a thing as the affinity of spirits, and among the authors of ancient and modern…
Category: China
Today’s One-Liner (#300)
Reading or the enjoyment of books has always been regarded among the charms of a cultured life and is respected and envied by those who rarely give themselves that privilege. –Lin Yutang, The Importance of…
Today’s One-Liner (#122)
The work of extending your goodness and correcting your faults must never stop. –Liu Wenmin, J. C. Cleary, Worldly Wisdom: Confucian Teachings of the Ming Dynasty
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…
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…