Buddhism

At dusk, I sat on the rooftop of Youli Café and raised my coffee cup toward the twin pagodas of Kaiyuan Temple. The camera recognized the distant towers and ignored the hand in front of it. Cup and fingers dissolved into a red blur; across the old city, the pagodas held their edges. ...

This piece is me going back over my own books. Two years ago I wrote down a sentence I’d counted among the things I had figured out. Recently, while chasing the source of a four-character phrase, I pulled it back out — and found it may be backwards from top to bottom. A sentence I’ve been carrying for two years In October 2025 I wrote this in my notes: ...

The seed of this piece was a conversation that ran for several rounds — starting from small talk about the weather and sliding, almost by accident, into “what is life even made of?” It won’t hand you an answer, because the thing actually worth having grows precisely where there is no answer. ...

“From love springs grief, from love springs fear; for one freed from love there is no grief—whence, then, fear?” —Dhammapada “Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, so let one cultivate a boundless love toward all beings.” —Metta Sutta In the same scriptural tradition, love is both the source of grief and fear, and a boundless, infinite kindness. These two seemingly contradictory lines are the doorway to this essay. To walk through that doorway, we will first borrow five modern lenses to illuminate the whole elephant of love, and then return to the one vantage point from which the whole elephant can be seen. ...