INSIGHTS FROM ASIA
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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In the beginning was the yearning — to seek what could be sought, find what could be found, learn what could be known — to go beyond mountains, know beyond deserts, discover beyond oceans…
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Mariko Mori’s themes are eclectic, embracing the fantasies of post-everything Japan and its extreme experimentation while recontextualizing traditional customs, mannerisms, and trends…
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The area in which I make my home, doing its best to approximate to the San Fernando Valley, has no temples or shrines or narrow winding streets of the kind, when young, I associated with the “real Japan.“
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It is not a coincidence that disciples of Zen who have achieved an intuition that is spiritual and transcendental and yet strikes decisively at the very heart of the physical world, are referred to as Masters…
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We sat in the little space, ringed by snowcaps, under a pulsing moon, 10,000 feet above the sea, and many hours from what the Eagles might consider civilization, and we tried to jolly into being all their songs of hard women in Los Angeles, the dangers of cocaine.
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As we travel the convoluted pathways of life, asking ourselves the myriad questions that characterize intelligent inquiry, such as “Why am I holding this golf club?”
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Heading down the winding road this morning under lowering mountain clouds as the sun was just dawning above the lake, its long rays edging sideways into the dark wedge of space beneath the thick clouds, I was perfectly placed to receive the gift of fresh light livening all the dew the night had draped on the mountainside…
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Pico Iyer is lost. It’s a condition he uses to great effect in his increasingly internalised travel books as we find him on the road to somewhere he’s not sure of.
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Watch any television channel in Indonesia for more than half an hour and it’s obvious that waria (male-to-female transvestites) are tolerated throughout the country…
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Astonishing viewers at the Cannes Film Festival, the 1994 film “Bandit Queen” thrust PHOOLAN DEVI into the international limelight. But Devi criticized the film for being overly graphic and for leaving out major events…
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Henry was wild about wildness, just couldn’t stop talking about it one way or another, and who can blame him, he saw it disappearing.
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“The thing I like best about Pyongyang TV is no commercials…unless, of course, you understand the programming for what it really is —one long political commercial!”
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A duck barks, then croaks, then meows. Students of the Pattana Village School in Bangkok’s Klong Toey slum sit on the concrete floor of the schoolyard to watch the Nithan Caravan puppet show…
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These days, a woman probably has more prospects of flying to the moon than becoming a titled member of one of the few remaining royal families, whose duties are much less glamorous…
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Every day, a team of three to four monks, each with a dust mask covering nose and mouth to prevent an accidental breath from destroying their efforts, drew the exquisitely complex image, from memory without the benefit of even a sketch.
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