A Perpetual Becoming

"Indeed, even though all monks are committed to the same task, deep down - as doctors or hospital construction workers are - the details of their practice are as different as their wildly divergent times and cultures.

A Christian generally longs to be rooted in the home he's found in God; the Buddhist, more concerned with uncovering potential, is more interested in experiments and inquiries, always pushing deeper.

In fact Christianity works from very uncertain beginnings toward a specific end (redemption and a life with God); Buddhism starts with something very specific (the Buddha and the reality of the suffering he saw) and moves toward an always uncertain future (even after one has attained Nirvana). The image of the open road speaks for a perpetual becoming."

Page 140.
'The Open Road - The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama'
Pico Iyer

Sitting still, turning inward

"The idea behind Nowhere - choosing to sit still long enough to turn inward - is at heart a simple one. If your car is broken, you don't try to find ways to repaint its chassis; most of our problems - and therefore our solutions, our peace of mind - lie within.

To hurry around trying to find happiness outside ourselves makes about as much sense as the comical figure in the Islamic parable who, having lost a key in his living room, goes out into the street to look for it because there's more light there.

As Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius reminded us more than two millenia ago, it's not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them; a hurricane sweeps through town, reducing everything to rubble, and one man sees it as a liberation, a chance to start anew, while another, perhaps even his brother, is traumatized for life."

Page 13, 'The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere', Pico Iyer

Stillness

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
 
From The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
by Pico Iyer

That sense of protectedness

"One sultry day in midsummer I invited a troubled friend from down the coast to visit me in the hermitage; if anywhere could bring her calm, I thought, it would be here. As soon as I led her into the chapel, she broke into tears before the small cross suspended from a skylight in a warm, round, golden space.

"You're moved?" I asked.

"Not only." I could hear what even the stillness could not heal. "I can feel all the things I never had when I was growing up. That sense of protectedness, of being held."

Page 204, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer

Miracle

"When his closest disciple, Ananda, asked him what was the greatest miracle," she went on, "walking on water or conjuring jewels out of thin air, changing the heat of one's body through meditation or sitting undisturbed in a cave for years and years, he (the Buddha) said, "Simply touching the heart of another human being. Acting kindly. That's the greatest miracle of all."

Page 114, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer

The only sins

"Graham (Greene) loved to write and talk of brothels, paid companions, and it was one of the habits that put off many an otherwise sympathetic reader, or convinced friends that they were dealing with an adolescent. But underneath the wished-for bravado there always seemed to lie something quieter and more sincere than simply a wish to shock. He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things you do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe.

In one play he barely acknowledged - it was never published in his lifetime - he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men's confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.

The only crime in such a place, he suggests - the play is called A House of Reputation - is to feel shame about one's presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange  with the talk of love (as one "sentimental ignorant fool" does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he's confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory - even a religion - before a human being."

Page 33, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer

Remember Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday? Is kindness the common denominator of all great writers?

Happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens

"Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

 The Joy of Quiet, Pico Iyer. Article here.

And the light comes and goes...

"...The Gospels, revealingly, tell us little of Jesus' spiritual formation and concentrate mostly on his words and actions. The Buddha story, by comparison, places most of its emphasis on how Siddhartha came to enlightenment - the process (which anyone can follow, even today, in principle) - while the particular details of his subsequent teachings and wanderings are often barely mentioned.

Even non-Christians may know some of Jesus' words, while typical Buddhists may know hardly any of Buddha's specific discourses. Buddha is a precedent more than a prophet; and where Jesus came to earth as the way, the truth, and the life, the Buddha came to suggest that the way is up to us, the 'truth' is often impermanent, and the light comes and goes, comes and goes, until we have found something changeless within."

Page 90.
'The Open Road - The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama'
Pico Iyer

A Teacher

"The whole idea of a teacher," he said, blue hawk eyes flashing, "is to present a reflective mirror. Not a blank surface, really, but a screen, on which you have to confront yourself. Like the moon on the water, in a way. When you confront a Zen master, what you're really seeing are not his limitations, but yours. "

"So that if you think he's strict, it's because you're guilty? And if you find him silent, it's because you talk too much?"

"Yeah, I guess. There are many ways to do it. Sometimes they just let you talk yourself into trouble. Or they''ll shock you out of your assumptions. Or they'll cut you down. Everything you think you're seeing in him is actually coming from yourself. A saint, I think, is someone who brings out the good in everyone he meets."

Page 289. "The Lady and the Monk. Four Seasons in Kyoto"
Pico Iyer