Sunday, December 26
Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.
“Men are reluctant to accept what is easy to grasp. Out of a perversity deeper than all Satan’s wiles, man refuses to acknowledge his own God-given rights: he demands deliverance or salvation by and though an intermediary; he seeks guides, counselors, leaders, systems, rituals. He looks for solutions which are in his own breast. He puts learning above wisdom, power above the art of discrimination. But above all, he refuses to work for his own liberation, pretending that first “the world” must be liberated. Yet, as Krishnamurti has pointed out time and again, the world problem is bound up with the problem of the individual. Truth is ever present, Eternity is here and now. And salvation? What is it, O man, that you wish to save? Your petty ego? Your soul? Your identity? Lose it and you will find yourself. Do not worry about God—God knows how to take care of Himself. Cultivate your doubts, embrace every kind of experience, keep on desiring, strive neither to forget nor to remember, but assimilate and integrate what you have experienced.”
— Henry Miller discussing Krishnamurti in The Books in My Life, p. 151
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, December 28
Bidia Dandaron (Vidyadhara, Russian: Бидия Дандарович Дандарон) (December 28, 1914, Soorkhoi, Kizhinga, Buryatia — October 26, 1974, Vydrino, Buryatia) was a major Buddhist author and teacher in the USSR. He also worked in academic Tibetology, contributed to the Tibetan-Russian Dictionary (1959) and made several translations from Tibetan into Russian. He is mostly remembered as a Buddhist teacher whose students in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania continued both religious and scholarly work, and as an early Buddhist author who wrote on European philosophy, history, and science within a Buddhist framework. Among his students were Alexander Piatigorsky and Linnart Mäll.
No comments:
Post a Comment