Paul Cézanne once said, "Art is a harmony parallel with nature." His intention was not merely copying the superficial view of what he sees but rather capturing the more profound phenomena where he exists. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) called it "Cézanne’s Doubt." What we see is indeed what we see. If so, how can we capture … Continue reading Art in Nature
Consciousness Only
In Mahayana Buddhism, there is the school called Consciousness Only (唯識）As the Four Noble Truths say, if there is no such thing as a self, then what this self sees must be imaginary or unreal. Nevertheless, the self looks like the most critical part in our life. How should we handle what we see? What … Continue reading Consciousness Only
A Small Village
We are enjoying the tremendous achievements of our modern and postmodern civilization. Through various global communications such as the Internet and advanced systems of transportation and telecommunication, we see the worldwide news realtime. The world looks so small as if everything is inside one tiny screen of our smart devices. The level of access to … Continue reading A Small Village
The Three Poisons
Life is suffering. It is the first of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. And the second is that the cause of this suffering is the ego that craves, desires, and attaches. The third is there is the way to eliminate the ego, which leads us to the fourth. The fourth is the introduction of … Continue reading The Three Poisons
The Kingdom of God is Within Us
One of the obsessions we humans have ever possessed since the birth of self-consciousness is our search for God. Where is He? How can we find Him? From religions to philosophies, even various theories of modern cosmology, we are never tired of this search. The irony, however, is that because of self-consciousness, we had lost … Continue reading The Kingdom of God is Within Us
Schrödinger’s Cat
Schrödinger's cat is one of the well-known thought experiments to explain the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the extreme microscopic scale, we can no longer observe things in the manner that Newtonian physics works. Observing things in the quantum level, what we see would be no longer distinctive between particles and waves. As commonly … Continue reading Schrödinger’s Cat
The Cosmic Dance of Shiva
One of the driving forces in the universe is the second law of thermodynamics, called entropy. From the Big Bang until today, we are in the midst of the gigantic explosion. And we are part of it. Because its scale is too extreme, we cannot sense it as the explosion. The reality, however, is that … Continue reading The Cosmic Dance of Shiva
