Sublime

In Fiji his father and older brothers had all but dropped such caste taboos, but at home in Navsari, caste purity was very much alive—so much so that no one needed to explain or speak of it. It was part of the subtle education he absorbed, woven into the fabric of a village whose traditions seemed eternal.

While a Hindu man's life is traditionally divided into four stages, each representing a stage of his spiritual growth, a Hindu woman's is divided into only three. Daughter, wife, widow: each is a relative status, a reference to her role vis-à-vis male kin. And of the three, by far the most important, the one that all of history seems devoted to pra

In August 2013, I happened upon a paper titled “The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless,” by Ronald Hamilton, which appeared to solve the conundrum. Hamilton’s essay, posted online, presented hitherto unknown evidence that the wild potato plant was in fact highly toxic, contrary to the assurances of Treadwell, Clausen, and app

I had many teachers, but the most central were two of the wisest Theravada teachers of the past century: one in Thailand, Ajahn Chah, and one in Burma, Mahasi Sayadaw.

Original Wisdom is another book about a European encounter with an aboriginal tribe. In this case, the European is Robert Wolff and the tribe is the Sng’oi of Malaysia. The book’s subtitle—Stories of an Ancient Way of Knowing

As the list of countries had grown, so had the backlash. Back in London, the India Office, the vast apparatus that managed not only India but all issues relating to Indians throughout the British Empire, found its in-box cluttered with dispatches from "Her Majesty's Subjects" in distress. Indians in Madagascar: discrimination in the matte

Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma's grandson, was sixteen years old, born and raised in Durban; he witnessed police "rounding up the African gangs only to let them off at a quieter spot to loot, kill and pillage. Policemen and gangs of white youth also robbed the Indian shops of what they could get after the rioters had broken the windows."