This interview was taken for East West Journal by Catherine Ingram and Leonard Jacobs on July, 1983. EWJ: Even though one is still suffering, is it possible to help others who are suffering? K: Why not? Though I may be suffering and you may be suffering, why not? That is one part of it. The […]
You will find him on the banks of the Ganges, dirty, naked, emaciated, fierce, plastered with mud and covered with beads. He has taken a vow never to wash, never to talk, never to comb his long matted hair. He has become little more than an animal, angry and sly. You will find him higher […]
Is it truly possible to live impersonally? Is it humanly possible? Is it necessary to be so in the first place? This book is the direct result of those words that acted as a trigger- to not take anything personally. Out of the blue, there was a revelation; an epiphany of sorts; an enlightened Bodhi […]
It was not unusual for me to stroll away into the huge, private, farmland in the scorching heat, that too in the month of May, where the workers had gone for lunch. The farmland is well protected by a barbed fence on three sides and a gated wall at the entrance, with a security cabin. […]
Stephen Batchelor poses the classical Zen question, “What is this?” The answer, he says, is right in front of us. Each time I sit down on a cushion and pay attention to what is happening, I find myself utterly incapable of putting whatever it is I’m experiencing into words. There’s something about the practice of […]
War is hell, and today more than ever. Although high-tech weapons make it a videogame for some, those same weapons make it unbelievably destructive for many more. Whatever valor was once associated with hand-to-hand combat has long since disappeared due to gunpowder, and the massive slaughters of the twentieth century have made it increasingly difficult […]
David R. Loy is an authorized teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan lineage of Zen Buddhism. How do bodhisattvas respond to the greatest crisis of our time? Appropriately, says Buddhist teacher and activist David Loy. One of my favorite Zen stories is short and simple. A student asks the master, “What is the constant activity of […]
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What […]
The whole world is talking about Covid-19, the global pandemic caused by an unassuming, invisible, but seemingly invincible enemy of the humankind. Even in the rural areas and suburbs, there are barricades, banning the public to move around, or even pass by a house, or a vegetable shop, having been identified as a place of […]
In the nineteenth century Emerson echoed the voice of Socrates and Montaigne and went beyond the notion of self-consciousness to self-reliance. Other new age gurus like Gurdjieff, J.Krishnamurti and D.T Suzuki made self-consciousness, the basic premise of their systems of esoteric philosophy. In this history of the idea of self-consciousness, one name was missing. That […]
The story of self-consciousness is very long. It is in fact, as ancient as humankind. For the unique and special characteristic of humans is their self – consciousness. Man was the only animal who turned his gaze inside and saw his own self, mind and ideas. This reflective consciousness was the cause for the birth […]
Montaigne was a voracious and efficient reader. He took notes of whatever he had read. He collected them and classified them – anecdotes, ideas, strange facts and whatever was new and would startle the reader. He used all the knowledge he had garnered from his studies. “Read to use” was the famous dictum of Francis […]