Bookmarks (28) clear filters

Brenda (laughing): Can you imagine a Taoist advertising agency? “Buy this if you feel like it. If it’s right. You may not need it.” Ursula: There was an old cartoon in The New Yorker with a guy from an advertising agency showing his ad and the boss is saying “I think you need a little […] Ursula K. Le Guin’s <i>Tao Te Ching</i>: How...

Little of San Francisco today is as it was half a century ago. But at the corner of Turk Boulevard and Lyon Street stands a true survivor: the Church of St. John Coltrane. Though officially founded in 1971, the roots of this unique musical-religious institution (previously featured here on Open Culture) go back further still. […] Saint John Coltrane: The San Francisco Church Built...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbwThw_Ap-4 Carl Jung founded the field of analytical psychology more than a century ago, and many reference his insights into the human mind and condition still today. Alan Watts certainly did his bit to keep the Jungian flame alive, whatever the outward differences between a Swiss psychiatrist and an English interpreter of Taoism, Hinduism, and […] Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things...

Consider that you eat the sins of the people —inscription carved above the entrance to the Monastery of Alcobaça‘s refectory Apparently, the Monastery of Alcobaça‘s resident monks were eating plenty of other things, too. Eventually their reputation for excessive plumpness became problematic. A hefty physique may have signified prosperity and health in 1178 when construction began on […] The Anti-Gluttony Door in Portugal’s Alcobaça Monastery Shamed...

Some religions prohibit the depiction of their sacred personages. Tibetan Buddhism isn’t quite so strict, but it does ask that, if you’re going to depict the Buddha, you do it right. Hence aids like the Tibetan Book of Proportions, which provides “36 ink drawings showing precise iconometric guidelines for depicting the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures.” […] How to Draw the Buddha: Explore an Elegant...

Tibetan monks in remote regions of the Himalayas have long claimed near miraculous powers through yogic practices that resemble nothing you’ll find offered at your local gym, though they may derive from some similar Indian sources. One such meditative practice, a breathing exercise known as tummo, tum-mo, or g-tummo, supposedly generates body heat and can […] How Tibetan Monks Use Meditation to Raise Their...

Today one can behold the pyramids of Giza and feel the temptation to believe that the ancient Egyptians knew something we moderns didn’t. Just imagine, then, what it must have felt like in the 17th century, when the recovery of lost ancient knowledge was still very much an active enterprise. Back then, no less formidable a […] Isaac Newton Theorized That the Egyptian Pyramids Revealed...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEfwbnMf3jM First appearances can be deceiving. Take physicist Emmanuel Maignan’s 1642 fresco in a corridor of Rome’s Trinità dei Monti monastery. Viewed head on, it appears to be a somewhat unconventional landscape in which one of the few remaining branches of a mutilated tree spreads over a city, far in the distance. Streaky clouds suggest heavy weather is brewing. Stroll […] A Quay Brothers Animation Explains Anamorphosis, the Renaissance...

No matter how little we know of the Hindu religion, a line from one of its holy scriptures lives within us all: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." This is one facet of the legacy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, an American theoretical physicist who left an outsized mark on history. For his […] J. Robert Oppenheimer Explains How He Recited a...

Buddhism goes way back — so far back, in fact, that we're still examining important evidence of just how far back it goes. Take the exhibit above, which may look like nothing more than a collection of faded scraps with writing on them. In fact, they're pieces of the laboriously and carefully unrolled and scanned […] One of the Oldest Buddhist Manuscripts Has Been...

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depending on how we define it. When did science fiction begin? Many cite early masters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its progenitors. Others reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein as the genesis of the […] When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work...

Most of us assume Japanese Buddhist monks to be silent types. In their personal lives they may well be, but if they want to go viral, they've got to log onto the internet and make some noise. This is the lesson one draws from some of the Buddhist figures previously featured here on Open Culture: […] A Beatboxing Buddhist Monk Creates Music for Meditation...

“It is sometimes difficult to appreciate the impact that the late-nineteenth century (and ongoing) occult movement called Theosophy had on global culture,” Mitch Horowitz writes in his introduction to the newly republished 1905 Theosophical book, Thought Forms. That impact manifested “spiritually, politically, and artistically” in the work of literary figures like James Joyce and William […] An Introduction to <I>Thought Forms</I>, the Pioneering 1905...

The Gutenberg Bible went to press in the year 1454. We now see it as the first piece of mass media, printed as it was with the then-cutting-edge technology of metal movable type. But in the history of aesthetic achievements in book-printing, the Gutenberg Bible wasn't without its precedents. To find truly impressive examples requires […] Breathtakingly-Detailed Tibetan Book Printed 40 Years Before the...

Mathematics, astronomy, history, law, literature, architecture: in these fields and others, the Muslim world came up with major innovations before any other civilization did. This Islamic cultural and intellectual flowering lasted from the 11th through the 19th century, and many of the texts the period left as its legacy have gone mostly unresearched. So say […] 500+ Beautiful Manuscripts from the Islamic World Now...

Few modern writers so remind me of the famous Virginia Woolf quote about fiction as a "spider's web" more than Argentinian fabulist Jorge Luis Borges. But the life to which Borges attaches his labyrinths is a librarian's life; the strands that anchor his fictions are the obscure scholarly references he weaves throughout his text. Borges […] The Foot-Licking Demons & Other Strange Things in...

Among historians of European Christianity, it long seemed a settled question that Irish Catholicism, the so-called “Celtic Rite,” differed significantly in the middle ages from its Roman counterpart. This despite the fact that the phrase Celtic Rite “must not be taken to imply any necessary homogeneity,” notes the Catholic Encyclopedia, “for the evidence such as […] New Digital Archive Will Bring Medieval Chants Back...

Most U.S. readers come to know Evelyn Waugh as the “serious” writer of the saga Brideshead Revisited (and inspirer of the 1981 miniseries adaptation). This was also the case in 1954, when Charles Rolo wrote in the pages of The Atlantic that the novel “sold many more copies in the United States than all of […] Evelyn Waugh’s “Victorian Blood Book”: A Most Strange...