A spiritual treasure map

A spiritual treasure map

Read more: A few queries

A spiritual treasure map

Read more: A Liangshan Yi Religious Classic

A spiritual treasure map

I have read a good number of spiritual treatises and some of them have helped me tremendously along my spiritual path, however short and bumpy the latter might be. However, sometimes a mere few sentences suffice to inspire me. Today, I just feel like sharing with others a few things I believe in and experience, and doing so in as concise a fashion as possible. What follows might be clumsily expressed, and it remains provisional in essence – for insights change and grow along the way, and it is never easy to write about “spiritual” matters. I take this risk though… Of course, spiritual journeys are manifold and some of the convictions I share may not resonate with other pilgrims’ experience. Still, here is my own little spiritual...

Read more: A Portable Spiritual Compendium

A spiritual treasure map

Bûcheron, dépose ta hache sous l'arbre de minuit
Et offre un siège ému à l'enfant de l'Esprit
Vois enfin la sève brassée avec la cendre, et le monde en sou neuf
Dévaster l'astre ancien des faubourgs et des temples

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A spiritual treasure map

Interview first published in Xuhui News (Vol.2, N.9, April 2012), by Guan Xin

What does it mean to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the birth of Xu Guangqi? What values should it lead us to promote?

Xu Guangqi was a man of extraordinary stature: a statesman thoroughly familiar with the Chinese philosophical and cultural tradition; a man of practical abilities fascinated by technical and scientific progress; an agriculturist who embarked on this field out of philanthropic concerns; a patriot endowed with military skills… but he was also someone who, in the person of Matteo Ricci and other Jesuit missionaries, discovered Otherness. He was able to challenge himself, to enter into a new understanding of existence, while remaining...

Read more: Celebrating 450 years of Xu Guangqi

A spiritual treasure map

Is China really experiencing a religious revival?

Also available in streaming on Youtube

Read more: China's paradoxical religious revival

A spiritual treasure map

Confucius’ teachings and ideograms link North-East Asians together.
Confucian thought is an integral part of the culture of Northeast Asian countries. Studying modern Korean literature requires knowing Chinese classical literature and understanding its influence on Korean literature. Borum, doing a Master degree in Korean philosophy at the Academy of Korean Studies, and who has been learning classical Chinese for many years, said Confucianism is still rooted in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and even, to a certain extent, in Vietnam.
More than a merely academic trend, Confucianism has deeply influenced thought and life in North-East Asia, creating strong ties between the people of these countries. One can find similarities in their ways of...

Read more: Confucius is the 'father' of Northeast Asia.

A spiritual treasure map

What does a man carry in his life? What’s the purpose of life? What can a man leave after him when he dies? These are the questions I often ask myself when working in the “Yuan Dancers”.
I have gotten used to the “sacred” body perception of the state of dancing and chanting in the aboriginal ritual. When I have to get back on the “human” state of body perception, it means to enter a process of self-reflection. In rehearsal, “self inspection” is a mental exercise that I usually take.

The moment of performing is a kind of memory and also a self-awakening. Every era has its own heavy cultural burden. The historical wound that remains from the aboriginal history in every rehearsal strikes my mind. Therefore I often ask...

Read more: Dancing a Life that Can be Sustained

A spiritual treasure map

The performance of rituals can be seen as an embroidery, as a sacred cloth weaved by the dance, as a work that is offered to the gods, so that they may grant you the grace of survival and renewal. Today, the construction of the new house calls for a ritual. A priest-shaman of the Qiang (duangong) turns towards the altar of the household (every household has an altar in the corner of the main room of the house, facing the door. The altar and the area around it are loaded with taboos). The god of the household and the ancestors, the kitchen god, the god of the threshold are all invoked, so that they may give their blessings. The demons are driven away one after another, especially in the kitchen, a most dangerous place: in the kitchen we...

Read more: Embroidering the Earth

A spiritual treasure map

 

It is already quite difficult to imagine what was our life when we were in our mother’s womb… So, imagining what I was imagining when I was an embryo… Still, slowly, there must be something like a sense of imagination that was awakening in me, right? I was living within the palace of the human body, I was progressively perceiving sounds, sufferings and, who knows, tenderness… Did I obscurely know that one day I would come out and enter a world far, far bigger than the one I was presently living in? Was I dreaming about it the way I now wonder what the afterlife world may look like? I was obscurely preparing for death and birth, united into one…Maybe all the obscure feelings and perceptions that occurred to me during these...

Read more: Imagining the world from my mother’s womb