Category: Classics

Trying To Be One-Pointed

In the autumn, on retreat at a mountain temple Although I try to hold the single thought of Buddha’s teaching in my heart, I cannot help but hear the many crickets’ voices calling as well….

“If Not You, Who?”

Having recently read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and Deep Work, I thought of Marcel Proust’s Time Regained, volume 7 in his In Search of Lost Time. 1. As for the inner book of unknown symbols……

Finding One’s Lost Mind

Julia Ching, The Philosophical Letters of Wang Yang-ming University of South Carolina Press, 1972 I previously studied with delight Julia Ching’s To Acquire Wisdom: The Way of Wang Yang-ming. Wang was the towering philosophical figure…

This Pilgrimage of the Heart

I first read the seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time spring through autumn of 1997.  A couple of years later, I read the collection of Proust’s essays in On Art &…

Making It Be  Spring with Everything

Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, 1996 Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know…

“My Library Is What Is in My Head”

Leland Poague, ed.Conversations with Susan Sontag University Press of Mississippi, 1995 Sometimes I feel that, in the end, all I am really defending—but then I say all is everything—is the idea of seriousness, of true…

Dharma Brother Wang Wei

Devoted Buddhist Semi-recluse Noticer of the minute particulars Painter of vast emptiness Appreciator of interbeing moment by moment Befriender of sages, visitors and travelers moving in and out of the Ch’an world His wife dead…

Training Everyday

For a true gentleman [junzi], learning is a matter of working on oneself. When slander and praise, glory and disgrace come, not only is his mind unmoved by such things, but he uses them as…

Sunday Afternoon

Sitting outside at Stella and Bella’s Cafe The Presidential debate two hours away Reading Su Tung-P’o’s bamboo poem Will Clinton deliver the knock-out blow? On my ballot, I’ll write in: Chuang Tzu –from novel-in-progress, Our Heroic…