Original Innocence

Pema Chodron writes in Awakening Loving Kindness, When the Buddha taught, he didn’t say that we were bad people or that there was some sin that we had committed—original or otherwise—that made us more ignorant than clear, more harsh that gentle, more closed than open. He taught that there is a kind of innocent misunderstanding […]

Pragmatic Buddhism

Patricia Anderson writes in Real or Pretend, I became enamored of Buddhism when I realized its basic tenet began by saying, essentially, “Life sucks and then you die, so what’s that all about? This was the religion for me. This was a framework I could use to examine my actual experience. Far from the promise […]

The Legacy of the Lascaux Cave Paintings

Bing’s daily picture featured 12-Oct-2018 featured the Lascaux prehistoric gallery of art: In the fall of 1940, a group of boys exploring the outdoors in the Dordogne area of southwest France came upon the entrance to a cave—and unwittingly discovered a treasure trove of prehistoric art. The walls of the cave now known as ‘Lascaux’ […]

Compassion is Our Nature

Jack Kornfield writes in The Wise Heart, Buddhist Psychology for the West: From the perspective of Buddhist psychology, compassion is natural. It derives from out interconnection, which Buddhism calls “interdependence.” This can readily be seen in the physical world. In the womb, every child is interdependent with its mother’s body. If either of them is […]

Meeting Expectations Quarter After Quarter

Warren Buffett asserted at the 2005 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn’t in the nature of running businesses. And, in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will be are either kidding investors, or they’re kidding themselves, or they’re kidding […]

Doing Less and Being Okay with It

Charlie Munger said at Daily Journal 2019 Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, We tried to do less. We never had the illusion we could just hire a bunch of bright young people and they would know more than anybody about canned soup and aerospace and utilities and so on and so on and so on. We never […]

A Second Handle on Reality

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe wrote in Hopes and Impediments, Literature, whether handed down by word of mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality, enabling us to encounter in the safe manageable dimensions of make-believe the very same threats to integrity that may assail the psyche in real life; and at the […]

Charlie Munger on Being Properly Educated

Charlie Munger said at the Daily Journal Meeting 2019, My definition of being properly educated is being right when the professor is wrong. Anybody can spit back what the professor tells you. The trick is to know when he’s right and when he’s wrong. That’s the properly educated person.

Pleasure of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s Literature

In Dawn to the West, his “History of Japanese Literature” series, Japanologist Donald Keene, the eminent American-born scholar of Japanese literature, writes about the vividness of the works of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, one of Japan’s most popular novelists: No one would turn to Tanizaki for wisdom as to how a man should live his life, nor […]

Having a Too-Hard Pile

Charlie Munger said at Daily Journal 2019 Annual Shareholders’ Meeting, Part of our secret is that we don’t attempt to know a lot of things. I have a pile on my desk that solves most of my problems. It’s called the too-hard pile. And I just keep shifting things to the too-hard pile. Every once […]