INSIGHTS FROM ASIA
I stare at the barren oatmeal, forbidding life, eroded by the elements, its own self-loathing nature…
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Sometimes I came across a tree which seemed like a Buddha or a Jesus: loving, compassionate, still, unambitious, enlightened, in eternal meditation, giving pleasure to a pilgrim…
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The moves of a master calligrapher resemble those of a dragon in flight. The calligraphy is so alive and vigorous that it seems to contain a dragon’s spirit flowing in the brush strokes…
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The Khmer Rouge willfully tried to strip the nation of its rich culture and heritage. The casualty Japanese expat Morimoto Kikuo is trying his hardest to save is Cambodia’s traditional art of silk weaving and dyeing…
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A civilized person is the one who “knows oneself, and tries to learn from others”; the one who knows and respects the difference of cultures; the one who seeks the transversal values of humanity found in all these cultures.
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The Silk Road would have been full of musicians…musicians from a dozen distinct traditions traveling in the same caravans, meeting around the same fires. What did they say to one another when they met…?
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I had never seen a funnier waiting room in my life…
Read MoreINTERVIEW BY KATHY ARLYN SOKOL
Arundhati Roy — brilliant, beautiful and rich. The brilliance and the beauty came early, the riches are of more recent vintage and allow her a new life as a self-proclaimed “cultural terrorist” who can fund her own “kiss-backs” (instants of righteous revenge). Against?
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After Toako showed her how to decipher the squiggles on the scores, Fujiko was enchanted with the magic she could conjure, but she soon shriveled under her mother’s blistering criticism and the relentless repetition…
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Political Scientist LEE JAE BONG explains, “ A unification policy has two conditions: First, is it really desirable? And second, is it really achievable?… “
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In the 1950s and the 1960s, the “frame” was of China as little blue ants or automatons. In the 1970s, following the Nixon administration’s opening, the frame was of the virtuous (entertaining, cute) Chinese…. In the 1980s, the frame was that China was “going capitalist.”
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It has been calculated that it would cost US $4 billion to educate 500 million Indian children conventionally to basic level — but only half that via the Net…
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NATURE, BUDDHISM
BY SUSAN MURPHY
To practice a comprehensive awareness of mind, and to live from that ground, means more than enriching our intellectual grip on the deeply disquieting descent of biodiversity.
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Talking to Weijia, who also goes by the name Viktor, I was struck by how his bicultural experience was at once almost painfully unique and at the same time so familiar and universal.
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In the last few years, an increasing amount of timber has been mined out of the frontier forests of Laos, nearly all of it bound for Vietnam…
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The Hawaiian word ‘mãnoa’means “vast and deep,” and is a literal description of the lush green valley on O‘ahu that is home to a unique bi-annual publication of the same name…
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Early one morning in a park in Taiwan I came across a man who had stopped off on his way home from the market to harness himself to a tree…
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Graphic artist Mayumi Oda’s cultural, spiritual, and artistic odyssey has taken her through many lives, eras, countries, and incarnations…
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Eight hundred years ago, in a northeastern town of the Persian kingdom, a boy was born. When he was twelve years old, he chanced to meet the great Sufi master and Persian poet Attar, who told the boy’s father: “The fiery words of this boy will kindle the souls of lovers all over the world.”
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Edward A. Burger found his teacher, Master Guangkuan, in the Zhongnan Mountains in the winter of 1999. He completed his first documentary, Amongst White Clouds, about Zhongnan Mountain hermits in 2005…
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Time…is one of those currencies we exchange every time we cross a border. An hour in Japan (where everything is clockbound, and even televisions show the hour) is equivalent to a day in laid-back India…
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