Number of words: 124 Mistrust of conventional knowledge and reasoning is stronger in Taoism than in any other school of Eastern philosophy. It is based on the firm belief that the human intellect can never comprehend the Tao. In the words of Chuang Tzu, The most extensive knowledge does not necessarily know it; reasoning will … Read more

Number of words: 98 The Book of Changes is thus a work that has grown organically over thousands of years and consists of many layers stemming from the most important periods of Chinese thought. The starting point of the book was a collection of sixty-four figures, or ‘hexagrams’, of the following type, which are based … Read more

Number of words: 590 The principal characteristic of the Tao is the cyclic nature of its ceaseless motion and change. ‘Returning is the motion of the Tao,’ says Lao Tzu, and ‘Going far means returning. The idea is that all developments in nature, those in the physical world as well as those of human situations, … Read more

Number of words: 163 The word maya – one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy – has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the ‘might’, or ‘power’, of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as … Read more

Number of words: 133 Brahman, the ultimate reality, is understood as the ‘soul’, or inner essence, of all things. It is infinite and beyond all concepts.  Yet, people want to talk about this reality and the Hindu sages with their characteristic penchant for myth have pictured Brahman as divine and talk about it in mythological … Read more

Number of words: 740 The first important step towards an understanding of nuclear structure was the discovery of the neutron as the second constituent of the nucleus, a particle which has roughly the same mass as the proton (the first nuclear constituent)-about two thousand times the mass of the electron-but does not carry an electric … Read more

Number of words: 665 Quantum theory has thus demolished the classical concepts of solid objects and of strictly deterministic laws of nature. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wave-like patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. A … Read more

Number of words: 317 Zen Buddhists have a particular knack for making a virtue out of the inconsistencies arising from verbal communication, and with the koan system they have developed a unique way of transmitting their teachings completely non-verbally. Koans are carefully devised nonsensical riddles which are meant to make the student of Zen realize … Read more

Number of words: 296 Studying a limited group of phenomena can also mean studying their physical properties only over a limited range, which may be another reason for the theory to be approximate. This aspect of the approximation is quite subtle because we never know beforehand where the limitations of a theory lie. Only experience … Read more

Number of words: 130 Shikan-taza is a heightened state of concentrated awareness wherein one is neither tense nor hurried, and certainly never slack. It is the mind of somebody facing death. Let us imagine that you are engaged in a duel of swordsmanship of the kind that used to take piace in ancient Japan. As … Read more