In My Own Way: An Autobiography

Several years ago the students of Stanford voted him the best teacher on the faculty, which must have enraged his colleagues because you cannot maintain proper status in an American university without cultivated mediocrity. You must be academically “sound,” which is to be preposterously and phenomenally dull. Once I had a professor who was teaching

A History of Everyday Things in England,

I wish I could show him that what he is looking for is not in India but in himself, and obvious for all to see.

Rinzai Roku (a celebrated Zen text of the T’ang dynasty) and the teachings of Bankei, the seventeenth-century Japanese master who, for me, represents Zen at its best.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Penguin, 1983), 270.

But this intellectual silence is not failure, defeat, or suicide. It is a return to that naked awareness, that vision unclouded by commentary, which we enjoyed as babies in the days when we saw no difference between knower and known, deed and happening.

far as I know he practiced za-zen, or formal sitting meditation, only occasionally, as I do myself, when the mood is on me. I prefer the more active Zen of walking meditation, archery, t’ai-chi exercises, mantra-chanting, practicing Chinese calligraphy, tea ceremony, swimming, and cooking. Too much za-zen is apt to turn one into a stone Buddha. In

Strength of personality—even though you yourself know very well that it is a big act—is always mistaken for an “ego-trip,” and, in the mystic, for a contradiction of everything you are saying.

un-English style of life. For me she became the archetypal representative of relaxed, urbane society seasoned with wit and fantasy—which is what I would like to be understood by the word “civilization.” Francis Croshaw was a