Category: Japan

Today’s One-Liner (#94)

Things that give you pleasure—When someone you don’t like meets with some misfortune, you’re pleased even though you know this is wicked of you.  –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney

Today’s One-Liner (#93)

This is something that requires thorough examination, with a thousand days  of practice for training and ten thousand days of practice for refinement. –Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings, translated by Thomas Cleary

Next Door

Such people do not realize that by alleviating the suffering of those before your eyes, practicing benevolence and living rightly, our good influence will extend far beyond.  –Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by Meredith McKinney…

Isn’t This the Truth?

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, a book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.  —Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by…

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…

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…

Today’s One-Liner (#12)

It’s terribly depressing to discover some quite worthless person blithely reciting a poem that you yourself had particularly liked and carefully copied down in a notebook.  –Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney

Containing Multitudes

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.) –Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 53 [Soen Nakagawa] had many faces: he was a simple monk, a “crazy wisdom” Zen master,…

Today’s One-Liner (#2)

Do not waste time on nonessentials.  –Miyamoto Musashi, Nine Articles, in John Stevens, Budo Secrets:  Teachings of the Martial Arts Masters