Non-Buddhist writing that reminds you of the dhamma

[nathan]

As 'reminiscent' this could be an endless list, so long as we understand that it is not the doctrine or any other lion's roar imho.
By some reasonable kind of acceptable exegesis, Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiasties, Psalms, Gospel of John, Gospel of Thomas, etc., etc..

Boatloads of poetry.

Bruce Cockburn
Most of the 194 lyrics listed at this site.

The Tibetan Side of Town
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/bruce+cock ... 12430.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[salmon]

My favourite has got to be this:

The Little Prince

"Goodbye," said the fox. "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember.

[nathan]

"What is essential is invisible to the eye," the little prince repeated, so that he would be sure to remember."

Sweet.

[nathan]

I just found this one and I think I will try it out as potentially a good way to calm my nerves on what will be my first long distance international air flight. I'm confident it could easily live up to this excerpt from the much longer review posted for it. I'll know in a day when it is done downloading. Ok, nuff from me about this guy. He is the most consistently dhamma reminiscent contemporary artist I know of. Having also not ever expressly said he was trying to be to my knowledge.

You've Never Seen Everything 2003 Bruce Cockburn (international version)
From the iTunes album review, copyright 2009 Apple Computer Co.

"It is pointless to place this record in a pecking order with Cockburns other work; that it adds to that body of work immeasurably is compliment enough. However, to say that it is necessary because it can cause self - and world - examination in any listener who plays it through is as high a compliment as can be offered."

[zavk]

Just paid quite a bit of money for tickets to see Simon & Garfunkel. I never though I could see them live and this is probably the last time they will tour internationally.

To me, artistes like Leonard Cohen and Simon & Garfunkel (ok Ben, I'll add Bob Dylan too, but like Retro I can't quite get into his music ) have an amazing ability to speak the truth of samsara in achingly beautiful ways.

Patterns by Simon & Garfunkel

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp
Paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle
Or a child's uneven scrawl.

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom.
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

From the moment of my birth
To the instant of my death,
There are patterns I must follow
Just as I must breathe each breath.
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies,
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies.

And the pattern still remains
On the wall where darkness fell,
And it's fitting that it should,
For in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin,
Or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns
That can scarcely be controlled.

Metta,
zavk

[zavk]

"All true learning should be alive with the sense of its own limitations and with the instinct for a vital experience of reality which speculation alone cannot provide."

Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth, Hollis and Carter, London, 1951: p44

[BubbaBuddhist]

Interestingly enough, the pillars at the the Oracle of Delphi had three phrases engraved upon them:

Know Thyself
Do nothing in excess.
and my favorite: Make no pledges, lest ye invite mischief.



J

[Mexicali]

James Joyce's Dubliners. Baldwin's Sonny's Blues.

[floating_abu]

Hi friends,

I'm curious about the kinds of non-Buddhist writing you've come across that remind you of some aspect or another of the dhamma.

They can be words from a poem, a novel, a song, a philosophical text, a scientific text, another religious tradition.... whatever..... even graffiti in public toilets!

I thought it'd be interesting to create a thread where people can post these quotes, as and when they come across something interesting.

Best wishes,
zavk

Le Petit Prince



Les hommes ont oublié cette vérité, dit le renard. Mais tu ne dois pas l’oublier. Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé.

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

[zavk]

As we all know, Buddhism avoids the mind/body or spirit/matter dichotomy that has characterised much of modern Western thought as well as some theistic religions. We are given practical advice on realising this, particularly in kayanupassana and vedananupassana practice. French philosopher and Talmudic commentator Emmanual Levinas seems to have captured the same understanding in the following passage. It also reminds me of Tilt's signature: 'This being is bound to samsara, karma is his means for going beyond' (SN I, 38).

The body is not only a happy or unhappy accident that relates us to the implacable world of matter. Its adherence to the Self is of value in itself. It is an adherence that one does not escape and that no metaphor can confuse with the presence of an external object; it is a union that does not in any way alter the tragic character of finality.

This feeling of identity between self and body, which, naturally, has nothing in common with popular materialism, will therefore never allow those who wish to begin with it to rediscover, in the depths of this unity, the duality of a free spirit that struggles against the body to which it is chained. On the contrary, for such people, the whole of the spirit's essence lies in the fact that it is chained to the body. To separate the spirit from the concrete forms with which it is already involved is to betray the originality of the very feeling from which it is appropriate to begin.

The importance attributed to this feeling for the body, with which the Western spirit has never wished to content itself, is at the basis of a new conception of man. The biological, with the notion of inevitability it entails, becomes more than an object of spiritual life. It becomes its heart. The mysterious urgings of the blood, the appeals of heredity and the past for which the body serves as an enigmatic vehicle, lose the character of being problems that are subject to a solution put forward by a sovereignly free Self. Not only does the Self bring in the unknown elements of these problems in order to resolve them; the Self is also constituted by these elements. Man's essence no longer lies in freedom, but in a kind of bondage. To be truly oneself does not mean taking flight once more above contingent events that always remain foreign to the Self's freedom; on the contrary, it means becoming aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bodies, and above all accepting this chaining.

......

Chained to his body, man sees himself refusing the power to escape from himself. Truth is no longer for him the contemplation of a foreign spectacle; instead it consists in a drama in which man is himself the actor. It is under the weight of his whole existence, which includes facts on which there is no going back, that man will say his yes or his no.

Emmanuel Levinas

[seahorse]

'Requiem For A Dream' by Hubert Selby Jnr. I read the whole narrative through a dhammic lens. It's a very powerful example of the varying attachments (narcotics, TV, food, greed for money and an 'easy life') of four people, how these slowly corrode their ability to relate meaningfully, annihilates their self esteem, leads them into an abyss of their own making and finishes with a devastating realisation that they have learned little.
It was like a slow sheet lightening reminder for me to wake up and start acting positively in the world.

[seahorse]

'Requiem For A Dream' by Hubert Selby Jnr. I read the whole narrative through a dhammic lens. It's a very powerful example of the varying attachments (narcotics, TV, food, greed for money and an 'easy life') of four people, how these slowly corrode their ability to relate meaningfully, annihilates their self esteem, leads them into an abyss of their own making and finishes with a devastating realisation that they have learned little.
It was like a slow sheet lightening reminder for me to wake up and start acting positively in the world.

[daverupa]

I thought Revolver was heavily laden with Dhamma themes; I later found out that the director had placed Kabbalah symbolism throughout the movie.

[Kusala]

I have a soft spot for Rumi.

“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
― Rumi, The Illuminated Rumi

“beyond the rightness or wrongness of things there is a field, I'll meet you there”
― Rumi

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
― Rumi

[Kamran]

I think the Iranian Poets Rumi, Khayyam, and Hafez seem Buddhist:

I sent my soul through the invisible,
some letter of that after-life to spell
and by-and-by my soul returned to me
and answered, "I myself am heaven and hell".
- Omar Khayyam

In these one,
two,
three days
a lifetime has passed,
like cascading waters
or a desert squall.
But regret for two days
never comes to mind:
the one that hasn’t arrived
and the one that long since passed

- Omar Khayyam