Old Path White Clouds
Drawn from original sources, Old Path White Cloudsis the beautiful classic recounting of the life and teachings of Gautama Buddha over the course of eighty years. It is retold alternately through the eyes of Svasti, the buffalo boy who provided kusa grass for the Buddha's enlightenment cushion, and the Buddha himself.
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What Hacker News says
- This is incredibly sad, Suchir went to my high school and we both went to Berkeley together. He was clearly very intelligent, and I was always sure he'd go on to be very successful / do interesting things.
If you're struggling reading this, I want to say that you're not alone. Even if it doesn't feel like it right now, the world truly wants you to be happy.
The path is open to you:
Old Path White Clouds [0]
Opening the Heart of Compassion [1]
Seeing That Frees [2]
[0] https://z-library.sk/book/1313569/e77753/old-path-white-clou... [1] https://z-library.sk/book/26536611/711f2c/opening-the-heart-... [2] https://z-library.sk/book/3313275/acb03c/seeing-that-frees-m...
- I believe the real evil is in the conceit of knowledge, and that the gross inequalities of material wealth are actually only symptoms of this.
Roughly 2,500 years ago two giants of ethical philosophy appeared on the scene in the form of Socrates (who can be learned about best through Plato's dialogues and Xenophon's underappreciated Socratic works) and Siddartha Guatama (I would recommend Thich Nhat Hanh's Old Path White Clouds as a reasonably unified source of his life and thought).
I know bringing those guys up probably seems sentimental, but I have lived experience with poverty, and political "realism" is only beneficial to those who have not as yet suffered the consequences of harmful patterns of behavior.
I think Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol illustrates a pretty good path for the exceedingly wealthy to become heroes, but there's this problem of sentiment, isn't there? And yet sentiment is constantly appealed to in all forms of commercial advertising!
People don't even know why or how they are here. Siddartha and Socrates' responses were basically that the answers are difficult to articulate or fathom, but the real pressing issue is how best to live life, and their answers were basically to moderate and do no harm or wrong, at least as much as possible, because the real goods are non-material, and to do wrong actually harms the perpetrator more than the victim.
- His honest commitment to non-violent action is legendary. The very embodiment of Buddha teachings. His words have touched generations. He will be missed.
A quote from my favorite Thich Nhat Hanh's book Old Path White Clouds:
"The same clouds that Buddha had seen were in the sky. Each serene step brought to life the old path and white clouds of the Buddha. The path of Buddha was beneath his very feet."
- > There is a famous story along these lines told for the first time by the German biologists Ernst Haeckel and Carl Vogt. As the story goes, the fortunes of England would seem to depend on cats. By nourishing themselves on mice, cats increase the chances of survival of bumblebees, which, in turn, pollinate shamrocks, which then nourish the beef cows that provide the meat to nourish British sailors, thus permitting the British navy—which, as we all know, is the mainstay of the empire—to develop all of its power. T. H. Huxley, expanding on the joke, added that the true force of the empire was not cats but the perseverant love of English spinsters for cats, which kept the cat population so high.
As a point of curiosity, there is a similar observation found in the Buddhist Pali Canon (I think), popularized by Thich Nhat Hanh in his 1987 book "Old Path, White Clouds". It is apparently a very old text, commonly referred to as the "universe in a teacup" in certain circles.
To summarize, one can be said to discern the entire universe in a simple teacup (or bowl) in the same way that one can trace the power of the British Empire to a cat.
> Without water, the potter would not have been able to mix the clay he used to fashion the bowl....Fire was necessary to complete the bowl. Looking deeply, I can see the presence of heat and fire in the bowl...I see the air. Without air, the fire could not have burned and the potter could not have lived. I see the potter and his skillful hands. I see his consciousness. I see the kiln and the wood stacked in the kiln. I see the trees the wood came from. I see the rain, sun, and earth which enabled the trees to grow...I can see thousands of interpenetrating elements which gave rise to this bowl...Contemplating the bowl, it is possible to see the interdependent elements which gave rise to the bowl...these elements are present within and without the bowl. Your own awareness is one of the elements. If you took away heat and returned it to the sun, if you returned the clay to the earth and the water to the river, if you returned the potter to his parents and the wood to the forest trees, could the bowl still exist? [...] Look deeply at this bowl, and you can see the entire universe. This bowl contains the entire universe.
