201130 — What I learned in my studies this morning

From Huang Po: Paths to the Buddha are many. Most are incremental. This can work, but it is slower than Zen, when the Mind is Dharma. 

(The Chun Chou Record, 20)

From Eric Hoffer: Cities and other "compact corporate structures [read: groups]," in which restrictions are loosening, are fertile ground for mass movements. It's not the restrictions people are rebelling against, but the loosening. They become seekers for a new system into which they can lose themselves. 

The seeker, coming from a totalitarianism which has begun to liberalize, 

<<...longs for certitude, camaraderie, freedom from responsibility, and a vision of something altogether different from the competitive free society around him — and he finds all this in the brotherhood and the revivalist atmosphere of a rising movement.>>

Cf. Christianity before the Reformation, France before the Revolution, Germany before the Nazis. 

<<In the countryside, where the communal pattern was least disturbed, the new religion [Christianity] found the ground less favorable. The villagers (pagani) and the heath-dwellers (heathen) clung longest to the ancient cults.>>

(The True Believer, V-35)

From Antipater of Tarsus: Ethics must needs touch and guide personal life and the day-to-day concerns people have. Though ethical laws are necessary, absolutism (acts are all virtuous or all vicious) is absurd. Lying is not the same as murder. Both are wrong and both should be avoided, but one is clearly worse than the other. 

Though we may miss our mark, like an archer, we should aim for the bull's-eye. Factors outside our control may alter the effects of our action / the course of our arrow, but we must have the Good as our aim. 

(Lives of the Stoics, pp. 65-72)