Buddhism

Friday

Ian Buruma

The problem with westerners seeking enlightenment in Asia

Call it a prejudice if you like. Living in Japan in the 1970s, I had a slight aversion to a particular type of westerner. He — for it was mostly a he — usually lived in Kyoto, sometimes wore a kimono and liked to sit in ancient temples chasing after that presumably blissful moment of enlightenment, awakening, satori, or whatever one wishes to call it. These seekers were less interested in Japan as a society of human beings. They wanted to float in higher spheres. As Christopher Harding explains in The Light of Asia, the Zen adepts, the Buddhist chanters, the rock-garden worshippers, the kimonoed fools (in my no doubt blinkered eyes) were part of a long western tradition.

Asia

Thursday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

Meeting Eric Ripert, chef of America’s best restaurant 

For Eric Ripert, cooking is like jazz. Ad-libbing, balance, motion. “One day the garlic is very pungent, one day it is not pungent. One day the onion is very juicy and sweet, one day it’s less, so you have to adapt all the time,” says the celebrated chef, who is the co-owner of Manhattan’s Le Bernardin, a close friend of the late Anthony Bourdain and a TV personality in his own right. “So, it’s very similar to music — I do not play the same notes all the time, I take a lot of freedom and liberties. Because I can.” Ripert is French but has — like his storied restaurant — become a New York institution. The chef lives on the Upper East Side with his glamorous, dark-haired wife Sandra (a real-estate broker who is Brooklyn born-and-raised, of Puerto Rican descent).

Ripert

Thursday

Emily Ferguson

Comfortably numb: Sam Harris on meditation

Sam Harris has been in several tangles in his busy career. This is to be expected from a leader of the New Atheist movement, a vocal critic of Islam (he called the term ‘Islamophobia’ a ‘pernicious meme’), a member of the Men’s Movement (shocker: some non-men found it anti-woman), and a gleeful saboteur of the notion of free will. But for years now, Harris has been using his background in neuroscience and meditation to help people untangle their minds through his podcast Making Sense. It’s hard to find a podcast about meditation that is not made by or for quasi-spiritual, anti-vaxxer yoga moms. Making Sense is for the more serious inquiring mind. Harris, dry and wry, discusses not only meditation but philosophy, science, politics and ethics.

sam harris

Friday

Libby Emmons

The Dalai Lama’s beauty contest

The Dalai Lama said that if his successor were female, she’d have to be pretty. The internet freaked out. The Lama, the reincarnated head of the Buddhist religion and the household deity of the Hollywood left, was doubling down on remarks made in a 2015 interview with the BBC: ‘“If a female Dalai Lama comes, she should be more attractive,” he says while laughing.’ The Lama, who was wearing his usual outfit of a loose orange robe with a red blanket casually thrown over one shoulder, was roundly critiqued at the time for these unfashionable remarks. Every woman on the internet crossed her digital arms and uttered exclamations of disgust.

dalai lama