Tip #1 to begin preparations for a journey where the signposts are unfamiliar, where the new worlds you see reveal elements in yourself that you never knew existed.
1. Click HERE for the best Tokyo Vegan choices.
Embrace your own flaws and those of others.
Nothing lasts forever.
Embrace imperfection.
Though simple, objects include subtle details.
Balance of simplicity and complexity that leads to something new, like the tea ceremony.
Leads viewer to draw beauty out meanings from within.
and both eyes."
Attend to people and tasks with full attention.
This brings nearly instant inner peace. credit: Colleen Kieton
Experiment, learn from masters.
Integrate learnings into practice.
Imitate, then innovate, adapt to different situations.
Follow, breakaway, transcend.
My first trip to Japan was as a Japan/Fulbright scholar. I think it was one of my former students, Matthew Mori, who first alerted me to a common blunder made by fist time travelers in Japan.
He said: "Don't get in the tub to soap down or wash your hair." The bath is not for washing, but for soaking in fresh clean hot water. Washing and scrubbing belong outside the tub. Traditional Japanese bathing is a ritual handed down over many centuries; the perfect moment of tranquility.
WHAT I LEARNED: 1. When staying in a traditional Japanese home, in the bathroom, you will find an stool, hand shower wand on a flex hose and an extra drain outside the tub. See photo left. Japanese people, sit on the stool, scrub down, wash their hair and rinse down outside the tub. Hence the extra drain outside the tub. Any splashed water in the bathroom drains away. Once clean, then it is appropriate to soak in the tub. Photo credit: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/japanese-apartment-bathrooms-explained/
2. I've come to admire the Japanese in many ways, but at the top of the list is just how good they are as a nation in reducing carbon emissions.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: the time we can measure, linear, and the time we experience within that expands and contracts, some call it soul time.
Chronos which we've already spoken of and
Kairos...
Kairos The opportune moment.
It is one of two words that the ancient Greeks had for 'time'; the other being chronos (χρόνος). Whereas the latter refers to chronological or sequential time, kairos signifies a proper or opportune time for action.[citation needed] In this sense, while chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative, permanent nature.[2]
Some attribute to Einstein this quote, it's not, but that's not the point:
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” ... and that describes kairos.
In the literature of the classical period, writers and orators used kairos to specify moments when the opportune action was made, often through metaphors involving archery and one's ability to aim and fire at the exact right time on-target. For example, in The Suppliants, a drama written by Euripides, Adrastus describes the ability to influence and change another person's mind by "aiming their bow beyond the kairos." Kairos in general was formulated as a tool to explain and understand the interposition of humans for their actions and the due consequences.[5]
Kairos is also an alternate spelling of the minor Greek deity Caerus, the god of luck and opportunity.[6] --Wikipedia
In Hippocrates' (460–357 BCE) major theoretical treatises on the nature of medical science and methodology, the term kairos is used within the first line. Hippocrates is generally accepted as the father of medicine, but his contribution to the discourse of science is less discussed. While "kairos" most often refers to "the right time," Hippocrates also used the term when referencing experimentation. Using this term allowed him to "express the variable components of medical practice more accurately." Here the word refers more to proportion, the mean, and the implicit sense of right measure.
Hippocrates most famous quote about kairos is "every kairos is a chronos, but not every chronos is a kairos."[22]
Click HERE Japanese Zen Buddhism
Zen is a way of living rather than a religion. It is not dualistic.
From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The most distinguishing feature of this school of the Buddha-Way is... that wisdom, accompanied by compassion, is expressed in the everyday lifeworld when associating with one’s self, other people, and nature.
"...the Zen practitioner can celebrate, with stillness of mind, a life directed toward the concrete thing-events of everyday life and nature.”
"Generally speaking, Zen cherishes simplicity and straightforwardness in grasping reality and acting on it “here and now,” for it believes that a thing-event that is immediately presencingbefore one’s eyes or under one’s foot is no other than an expression of suchness. In other words the thing-event is disclosing its primordial mode of being such that it is as it is. It also understands a specificity of the thing-event to be a recapitulation of the whole; parts and the whole are to be lived in an inseparable relationship through an exercise of nondiscriminatory wisdom, without prioritizing the visible over the invisible, the explicit over the implicit, or vice versa.
As such, Zen maintains a stance of “not one” and “not two,” that is “a positionless position,” where “not two” means negating the dualistic stance that divides the whole into two parts, while “not one” means negating the nondualistic stance occurring when the Zen practitioner dwells in the whole as one, while suspending judgment in meditation. The free, bilateral movement between “not one” and “not two” characterizes Zen’s achievement of a personhood with a third perspective that cannot, however, be confined to either dualism or non-dualism, neither “not one” nor “not two”.
It's taken me all these years to realize, that all I know about Zen Buddhism, I learned from my mother. She was 98% Japanese, I know that because my DNA is 49% Japanese. But that's not the point. The point is that she taught me about Zen without ever mentioning the word. Without lectures, dogma, or readings. She lived a life of Zen, and that's how I learned everything I know about Buddhism.
