The Open Road by Pico Iyer

Author:Pico Iyer [Iyer, Pico]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

In the end, I thought, it was probably not so different from what you find in any relationship, even with those you have known for an entire lifetime: at the core there is likely to be a mystery. And all that you know and learn about a person does not take away from the vast amount you cannot and will never know. “Our knowledge,” as Isaac Bashevis Singer, wise chronicler of spirits and golems pointed out, “is a little island in a great ocean of non-knowledge.” In the Dalai Lama’s case, bringing a complex and sometimes secret set of rites out into the world, this was especially true, since so much of what belonged to his tradition could make little sense to another culture. And so he offered a carefully watered-down form of general teaching centered on basic human truths—science plus ethics, in effect—and true to his central contention that at every moment you should try to do some good, but at the very least should do no harm.

He’d told me once how surprised he had been, on meeting a Christian in Europe, to hear the man say that “the self is a mystery.” And God, too. For someone coming from the Indian philosophical tradition, he said, with its three thousand years of investigating the self, the self seemed eminently knowable, a series of laws and connections that could be investigated as any other aspect of nature or consciousness could. And yet for all of that, the rites or practices by which the mind conducted these investigations, examining the self and even its unreality, involved techniques or customs that to the outsider were at least as mysterious as any other matter of incarnation.

Often, I recalled, in the years after his death, the Buddha was represented by just the image of an empty throne.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.