Seeing Clearly
Pema Chodron writes in The Wisdom of No Escape and The Path of Lovingkindness, Meditation is about seeing clearly the body that we have, the mind that we have, the domestic situation that we have, the job that we have, and the people who are in our lives. It’s about seeing how we react to […]
Being Awakened
Stephen Batchelor writes in After Buddhism: To be awakened does not mean to understand the truth or nature of reality, which then frees you from ignorance, leaving you awakened. It may be more accurate to think of truth as truthfulness, or living a truthful life. It means to live in a certain way rather than […]
Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, the First Great Antihero in Literature
With spectacular forthrightness, French novelist Marie Henri Beyle Stendhal handled love and ambition with the same investigative skill. His revelation of conformism and delusion more than justifies the recurrent claim that he is a major precursor of psychological realism. Julien Sorel, the central character of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black is one of fiction’s […]
The Blue Sky is Always There
Thich Nhat Hanh writes in Calming the Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism: The Kingdom of Heaven is like the blue sky. Sometimes the blue sky reveals itself to us entirely. Sometimes it reveals half of itself, sometimes just a little bit of blue peeks through, and sometimes non at all. Storms, clouds and […]
Impediments to Alibaba’s Global Domination
In the bestselling The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, New York University-academic and business analyst Scott Galloway pontificates about the many obstacles Alibaba faces in its aspiration for global domination: As such, Alibaba carries a lot of water on its path to global domination. First, there is no historical precedent […]
Dismantle the Trance
Tara Brach writes in Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha, The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience. By accepting absolutely everything, what I mean is that we are aware of what is […]
The Wisdom of Nondiscrimination
From Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Path of Emancipation, My right hand, which has written hundreds of poems, can also write calligraphy and ring the bell. Yet it is not proud of itself. It never tells the left hand, “You are good for nothing. You don’t write poems or practice calligraphy.” … It knows that it […]
The Experience of Suffering
Sharon Salzberg writes in The Buddha Taught One Thing Only, There are times in our lives when we wish we could change the ending of the story. Sometimes we lose what we care about, we are separated from those we love, our bodies fail us as we get older, we feel helpless or hurt, or […]
Slaving Away for Materialistic Lifestyle
Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in his international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the […]
What the Buddha Taught
Buddhist teacher and Zen priest Joan Halifax in The Lucky Dark: The Buddha taught that we should practice helping others while cultivating deep concentration, compassion, and wisdom. He further taught that enlightenment is not a mystical, transcendent experience but an ongoing process, calling for intimacy and transparency; and that suffering diminishes when confusion and fear […]