Eastern Journeys

2022 so far has been an interesting tale for me.  I'll spare you readers its downside and will instead focus on some things that have been particularly enlightening as I've navigated its path.  First, the books that I've read this year have all contributed well toward expanding my vision to see what life is about from many different perspectives, though there is a common theme here as you will see: Doerr, Anthony. Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel. Simon & Schuster, 2021. We see the world from ancient Greek times all the way into the postapocalyptic future.  The characters' struggles all form links from one story to the next through this epic thread as they learn things that bring them great wisdom toward understanding that their world views have been greatly mistaken or greatly misguided but ultimately transcendent. Simon & Schuster's editor endorses Cloud Cuckoo Land Cameron, Peter. What Happens at Night. Catapult Books, 2020.  https://books.catapult.co/books/wha...

 I encountered the work of obscure eighteenth-century landscape artist Yuan Yao after meandering through many virtual museums and looking at hundreds of different artworks.  What struck me about this artist's work is that it seems to incorporate many elements of Buddhism, arriving at a final state of nirvana: tranquility, perspective, proportion, transcendence.  The specific work of his that I chose is a landscape of Kunming Lake from around 1740.  It is typical of his work in that Yao's landscapes come from areas along the coast of the Yellow Sea, scenes of classic Chinese landscape elements--water, trees, and islands--near where he was born in Yangzhou.  "Album of Figures, Landscape and Architecture: Leaf D, Kunming Lake", Phoenix Art Museum Not much is known about his life or even when he was born, but I was able to find a few things.  He was the nephew and student of Yuan Jang, who served at the imperial palace during the Yongzheng era so that it's like...

If we were to stay at a Zen monastery, what would we expect to find there and how might our experience grow if we were to extend our stay there? The answer to this first lies in the definition of what a Zen monastery is.  In his book Awakening: An Introduction to the History of Eastern Thought, author Patrick Bresnan defines a Zen monastery simply as "a community of monks living and working together under the guidance of a roshi ...in the shared belief that the communal way of living offers the within which to follow Buddha's path leading to Enlightenment. The roshi, an already enlightened man or woman, will oversee the life of the community and personally guide the development of each of the monks." (Bresnan, 502)  Whether the Zen monastery is located in a busy city or somewhere remote, it is "a place of great tranquility and beauty" where "one has the feeling of entering another realm" and "everything-grounds, buildings and other structures-all ...