cat /proc/claus

So I’m reading this book, called “TsurezureGusa”, translated as “Essays on Idleness” (the translation of the title comes from the first verse of the book, which means roughly “while I have nothing better to do”).

This book was written by a buddhist priest around 1100, called kenkou. It is composed of a series of short essays, from two or three sentences to two or three pages. The topics of the essays range from the best way to close a wooden box, to opinions about the nobility and that time, and lots of buddhist philosophy.

Well, this one got my attention today. I’ll just copy the relevant bit:

92
(…)
A man studying some branch of learning thinks at night that he has the next day before him, and in the morning that he will have time that night; he plans in this way always to study more diligently at some future time. How much harder it is to perceive the laziness of mind that arises in an instant! Why should it be so difficult to do something now, in the present moment?

I didn’t know there were grad students in pre-medieval Japan!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 4th, 2006 at 3:53 am and is filed under Interests, Hahaha!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.