“Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go i...” — Annie Dillard Quote

Buddhism notes that it is always a mistake to think your soul can go it alone.

In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

Matters of taste are not, it turns out, moral issues.

Well, I'm Buddhist, Ray, and so part of my Buddhism has allowed me to look a little more deeply at people and the events in my life that created me. And I think a lot of that Buddhism comes out in the world view in this novel.

Buddhism is really, one of its main practices is understanding and experiencing compassion, and how that ultimately is a road to happiness.

What's really great about Buddhism is its rational, informal quality. Coming from my experience of growing up a Catholic, I found Buddhism to be refreshingly easygoing and forgiving.

Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.