There is a shaft of sunlight filtering through the trees, in which minuscule particles of dust are dancing. There is the sound of running water coming from a nearby stream. A spider is making its way

Buddhist poetry is dominated by records of similar encounters with just such tiny facets of the world, which reach our senses only after our egos have loosened their grip on our faculties. Coming along the mountain path I find something endearing about violets reads a poem by the Zen poet Bash. Working our way through the undergrowth, we become disinterested surveyors of our own existence, and hence ever so slightly more patient and compassionate observers of the planet, its people and its small purple flowers. (illustration credit 4.20) 3. The specifics of the exercises taught at Buddhist and other retreats are perhaps not as significant as the general point they raise about our need to impose greater discipline on our inner lives. If the predominant share of our distress is caused by the state of our psyches, it seems perverse that the modern leisure industry should seek always to bring comfort to our bodies without attempting simultaneously to console and t

We require effective centres for the restoration of our whole beings; new kinds of retreats devoted to educating, through an array of secularized spiritual exercises, our corporeal as well as psychological selves. iv. Teaching Wisdom Ultimately, the purpose of all education is to save us time and spare us errors. It is a mechanism whereby society whether secular or religious attempts reliably to inculcate in its members, within a set span of years, what it took the very brightest and most determined of their ancestors centuries of painful and sporadic efforts to work out. Secular society has proved itself ready enough to accept the logic of this mission in relation to scientific and technical knowledge. It sees nothing to regret in the fact that a university student enrolled today on a physics degree will in a matter of months be able to learn as much as Faraday ever knew, and within a couple of years may be pushing at the

Yet this selfsame principle, which seems at once so obvious and so inoffensive in science, tends to be met with extraordinary opposition when applied to wisdom; to insights related to the self-aware and moral stewardship of the soul. Here, remarkably, the defenders of education, who would ridicule the notion that a class of freshly enrolled physics students ought to be left to work out the theory of electromagnetic radiation on their own, will declaim that wisdom is not something that one person can ever teach another. This prejudice has so subsumed the teaching of culture as to have more or less stamped out the ambitions of Mill and Arnold, as well as the magniloquent hopes of Rilke, who in the last line of his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo surmised that it was the ultimate wish of all great artists to admonish their audiences, Du musst dein Leben ndern (You must change your life). It is to religions credit that they have never sided with