Some of Jack’s Dharma
Practice recognition of complete emptiness of all things at all times, under every condition, everywhere, and you will learn by yourself what Buddha preached. Free from Desire: What I really only want, what Ma’s given…
Category: World Literature
Sooner or Later, We All Know Somebody Like This
“… and you know I’m not a father who goes around bragging about his kids–but on the subject of Beilke …” Tevye, in Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman, translated by Hillel Halkin
Forgetting the Sufi Three-Gate Rule
Awkward and Embarrassing Things You happen to say something rude about someone, and a child who overhears it repeats your words in front of the person concerned.— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book, translated by Meredith McKinney…
Both/And
Like other works, [Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets] is concerned with the nature, and, more importantly, the limits of human achievement. It assumes what its surrounding works assume: The continuity and dignity of the…
Look up!
“Do you look at the stars a lot? Do you know them? Plato said that sight is not truly precious unless it helps us to know the stars, the planets, the moon, and the sun….
How to Save Energy
But whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it, for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect. –Samuel Johnson, quoted in Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson and the…
Breakdown Precedes Breakthrough
[Proust] discovered the device, or the design, of what could be called a play outside a play. By seeing his personal situation from outside as if it radiated a larger, more generalized narrative action of…
Oy Vey Iz Mir
“If it didn’t work out God mustn’t have wanted it to. You, Tsaytl, just weren’t meant to be a fine lady with a house full of grand things and two parents who could finally enjoy…
The Wonderful Sei Shōnagon
No one had sharper ears than the Minister of the Treasury. He truly could have heard the fall of a mosquito’s eyelash. The mountain dove is a very pure-hearted and touching bird—they say it can…
Journals and Commonplace Books
It was becoming a habit with [Thoreau] now to work back over his journals and to reread books, to reengage old subjects in the light of new interests, to revise and recopy his own earlier…