“When the water is deep, the boat rides high. When there is much mud, the Buddha is large.” —Dōgen, “The Indestructible Nature in Deep Muddy Water” in the Eihei Kōroku “Know thyself” is the fairly famous injunction inscribed overhead at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The meaning of this may be less obvious than it seems, but regardless of how it was intended, we can read it in different ways depending on what we understand by “knowing” and what we…
It seems to me that my life, like surely many people’s lives, resembles the trajectory of modernism to postmodernism (to post-postmodernism?). That is, like many people, when I was a child everything was imbued with a robust intrinsic identity and meaning, both of which could be definitively and determinedly known. One of the most obvious examples of this was the faith in the near omniscience of my parents, and once in school and out of the house, in that of…
Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of sentience,… Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus,…
In “Continuous Practice, Part I,” Dōgen writes: In the continuous practice of the way of buddha ancestors, do not be concerned about whether you are a great or a modest hermit, whether you are brilliant or dull. Just forsake name and gain forever and don’t be bound by myriad conditions. Do not waste the passing time. Brush off the fire on top of your head. Do not wait for great enlightenment, as great enlightenment is the tea and rice of…
I have suffered death since 3— Grandmother’s open casket— casting a shadow on everything since I have suffered the death of insects—some drowned, some squashed many on their backs refusing to go gently I have suffered the death of animals, some by my hand— both accidental and with tear-shuddering compassion— some on the vet’s table some on the bathroom floor all struggling, gasping: suffering. I have suffered the dying of family, never death itself, that moment. The hospital bed. The…
1. “What is philosophy?”— What kind of question is that? I’ve long found it fascinating and of huge importance that, “What is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question. This is not the same for other fields. That is, “What is science?” is not a scientific question. Perhaps if it is read as asking, “What do people called ‘scientists’ do?” it could be read as an empirical question, though that is not enough to make it scientific. I take the questions, “What…
Often when people fear hell, they fear it in the sense of an afterlife of eternal torment, or, perhaps more sophisticatedly, eternal separation from God. As others have noted, though, hell exists on earth in a variety of forms. For example, you can read Sartre’s “No Exit” as making the case that “hell is other people.” As an introvert, I find that line of thinking attractive, but I think a more pressing form of hell on earth is putting one’s…
“…if I say again that the greatest human good is daily to converse about virtue [value/meaning], and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living – that you are still less likely to believe.” —Socrates in Plato’s Apology Others have written on this essay’s topic, likely better than I. And since my background is largely academic, I feel a pressing urge to research what they’ve said,…
In Mahayana Buddhism, enacting the life of the Bodhisattva is the goal of every practitioner. The Bodhisattva is one whose compassion for others’ suffering is so great that she delays her final escape from samsara (the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, life to life, and which is characterized by suffering and dissatisfaction) until she has helped to awaken all other sentient beings, freeing them from suffering and samsara. There are two basic varieties of Bodhisattvas. The first are the…