Show Up Already
Even if you lack all faith, simply to seat yourself before an image, hold a rosary and take up a sutra book is to perform a virtuous act, however perfunctory, even seated on your meditation…
Category: Commonplace book
Today’s One-Liner (#19)
Whenever people really believe in some truth larger than the academic world, they do not dedicate themselves to the pursuit of academic success with as much ferocity as the people who believe in absolutely nothing. …
Selective Sensitivity
On one of his trips [in South America] ([Franz Stangl] confessed to Gitta Sereny in 1971), ‘my train stopped next to a slaughterhouse. The cattle in the pens, hearing the noise of the train, trotted…
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…
Appreciating Jack Appreciating
Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters: 1940-1956, v. 1 As I’m convinced of the the utility of “pulling”* from my reading, I found the following gems in some of Kerouac’s letters up till he had to deal…
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…
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…
Dear Ziva
Dear Ziva, I’ve read two of Hillel Halkin’s books: Letters to an American Jewish Friend: A Zionist’s Polemic and A Complicated Jew: Selected Essays. (I loved his translation of Sholem Aleichem [Tevye the Dairyman and…
The Outgoingness of the Heart
In no Chinese poet’s works does compassion for human suffering play so large a part. The works of his maturity — the ballads, satires and petitions- — are largely grounded on pity, and even at…